The insurance sectors of the UK and Switzerland are set to continue trading freely with one another after the UK has left the EU. The new arrangement will replicate the effects of the existing EU agreement with Switzerland and will come into force when the current EU-Swiss Direct Insurance Agreement ceases to apply to the UK.

A growing number of local authorities are reportedly struggling to ‘balance the books’. Austerity has been with local government for eight years. Many council officers have identified that this point has been arrived at by a gradual process that has chipped away at the essence of local authorities – the services they deliver and the structures they use to do so. The accumulative effect, built up over years of budget cuts, adds to the anticipation around setting a sustainable budget. That becomes an ever more challenging prospect to finance managers, with higher risk levels and an increasing need to support the resilience of public authorities.

There are just a few weeks remaining to enter this year's Business Continuity Awards. Celebrating achievement in business continuity, security and resilience, the Business Continuity Awards are the most anticipated event in the industry calendar and provides unrivalled networking, alongside a night of entertainment and celebration.

Business sentiment around the ongoing Brexit talks is somewhat frayed after the government lost last night's vote in Parliament on its proposed deal. Even if yesterday’s deal had been passed, our future relationship with the EU would still be unclear, and as it is, businesses are left with even more questions than they had before.

Amazon Web Services is reported to have acquired Israeli disaster recovery startup CloudEndure, in transaction that could highlight a wider transition taking place within disaster recovery, according to Databarracks’s Peter Groucutt. The MD of the business continuity and disaster recovery firm says he thinks the most surprising part is that it was AWS that acquired CloudEndure, not Google Cloud Platform.

Assurance Software has announced a merger with ClearView Continuity, in what together they refer to as a union of "technology and cultural synergies that will allow us to accelerate product innovation and enhance customer value".

The US Department of the Treasury and the Office of the US Trade Representative have announced their intent to sign a UK-US covered agreement. The agreement is an important step in providing regulatory certainty and market continuity as the UK prepares to leave the EU in March 2019, as well as in making US companies more competitive in domestic and foreign markets and making regulations more efficient, effective and appropriately tailored.

Business continuity and IT disaster recovery specialist, Databarracks, has partnered with Rubrik to add cloud data management capabilities to its offering. Databarracks managing director Peter Groucutt commented: “The combination of back-up, disaster recovery and archive in a single, scalable product is exciting and addresses a need we see from mid-market and enterprise organisations.

Chubb has launched a new service for multinational companies and large middle market businesses which combines its terrorism & political violence underwriting, risk engineering, global security, catastrophe modelling and digital expertise.

ClearView has launched a new business continuity training toolkit using virtual reality to create more immersive environments for participants. ClearView VR, developed in partnership with specialist VR company Phygital, brings the benefits of highly engaging and realistic virtual environments for business continuity education, exercising, and awareness raising.

The 21st Annual Business Continuity Awards, celebrating achievement in business continuity, security and resilience, are open for entries. The Business Continuity Awards are the most anticipated event in the business continuity calendar and provides unrivalled networking, alongside a night of entertainment and celebration.

Cyber attacks and data breaches continue to top the list of challenges for business continuity professionals, according to the BCI’s latest annual Supply Chain Resilience Report. As per last year’s report, uptake of business continuity arrangements continues to grow, with increasing numbers of organisations embedding business continuity to protect supply chains – and that’s despite what it highlights as a declining commitment from senior management…

HawkSight Software has joined forces with PGI to offer users data feed integration capabilities covering geopolitical events, security incidents and business continuity threats. Working with PGI’s API, the software will display incident data from the last 48 hours each time a user logs in whilst storing older data for recall when required. Incident data can be displayed as a cluster, or heat layer, and may also be charted, with click through capability to enable interrogation of individual incidents in greater detail.

Some jobs are more risky than others. Individuals working in the emergency services, security, heavy industry or health and social care are clearly at greater risk of encountering psychological trauma due to the nature of their occupation. At the same time, though, very few in other, less obviously risky roles are completely immune to difficult or distressing events such as assaults on staff, serious accidents or injuries, robberies, or even the death or suicide of colleagues.

Risk reviews conducted by the Information Commissioners Office have revealed ‘areas of concern’ among eight different charities. The ICO conducted the risk reviews for a random eight charities after its enforcement against 13 charities in the period between December 2016 and April 2016.