Global supply chain sustainability specialist Ecodesk has teamed up with carbon footprinting and lifecycle analysts at Carbon River to deliver a total sustainability solution to businesses seeking to reduce supply chain risk and improve business continuity. Using carbon, energy, water and waste as key metrics, E-Chain can quickly build a comprehensive picture of supply chain sustainability through supplier profiling and benchmarking, identifying hotspots and risks.

This year’s Business Continuity Awards winners were announced last night at a glittering gala dinner held at the Hilton on Park Lane in London. Hosted by comedian Jo Caulfield, the annual awards are the definitive mark of achievement in business continuity and resilience.

Everbridge Software has acquired UK-based Business Continuity and Communication solutions provider Vocal. The combined entity will serve more than 2,500 clients globally with over 50 million unique end users a year, delivered through 12 distributed datacentres, and supported by employees in seven offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.

The winners of the 16th annual Business Continuity Awards will be exclusively announced next week at a glittering Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner at the Hilton on Park Lane. As always, this black tie event promises an evening of networking with hundreds of the biggest names in the business continuity field, combined with a night of celebration and entertainment.

PwC has appointed Will Brown as a director of its Enterprise Resilience practice. With extensive experience in the sector, Brown takes responsibility for building on and developing PwC's overseas resilience business.

Asia is more at risk from disruption of Middle East oil supplies than is either Europe or the US, yet as a whole it is less prepared to deal with such an upheaval, according to UK think-tank Chatham House. The Middle East now supplies nearly 50% of Asian oil consumption, compared with 12% and 16% of the US and Europe respectively. To mitigate the effects on Asian economies and global oil markets from disruptions in oil supply, Chatham House advocates a “pragmatic programme” of preparations.

Phoenix is to open a new Technology Innovation Centre, at its site in Birmingham. The centre is designed to provide a flexible environment to explore new technologies and solutions, helping customers to understand the impact of change to their IT infrastructure.

Crisis, issues and reputation management consultancy, Regester Larkin is to acquire crisis management and business continuity specialist Steelhenge Consulting. The two firms, which have have already collaborated on a number of client projects are both long established industry consultants.

Congratulations to all the finalists in this year's Business Continuity Awards. The awards provide an evening networking with hundreds of the biggest names in the business continuity field, combined with a night of entertainment. This year the Awards Gala Dinner and Ceremony will be held on 29 May 2014 at the Hilton on Park Lane, London. This year’s host is stand-up comedian Jo Caulfield. Read on for this year's shortlist.

The recent storms and flooding to impact the UK demonstrate that business continuity and disaster recovery are essential practices for all businesses – large and small. Research from the FSB has revealed that economic costs to SMEs as a result of the floods are set to exceed £830m, highlighting the need for business continuity.

The Business Continuity Institute has published a report into the cost of common threats to organisations, including IT and telecommunications outage, data breach, cyber attacks and adverse weather conditions. One of the aims of the report is drive home the message that business continuity is not the sole domain of an organisation’s business continuity professional.

Small and medium sized businesses in the UK are missing out on insurance deals available to them if they have a business continuity plan in place. This is the finding of a survey of over 500 business and IT decision-makers carried out by cloud services broker Cloud Direct, which shows over half were unaware there were insurance benefits in having a business continuity plan.

A new report published by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), in association with BSI, has revealed that IT-related threats are continuing to provide the greatest concern for organisations, ranking above other threats such as natural disasters, security incidents and industrial disputes. The annual BCI Horizon Scan shows that three quarters of business leaders fear the possibility of an unplanned IT and telecoms outage.

While this winter's wind and rain has been good news for umbrella and anorak manufacturers, it has not been such good news for hosts of the UK's sporting and leisure events, according to sports insurer Sportscover Europe. If the UK flooding continues into March it becomes increasingly possible that events such as the Cheltenham Festival next month could be cancelled.

As a direct response to the regional flooding, Phoenix has brought forward the launch of Re:Cover, a new service aimed at SMEs. Under its umbrella, businesses benefit from cover for both catastrophic IT failure and loss of office facilities following a disaster such as a fire, flood, local police incident or gas leak. As part of the launch, the provider is also offering one year’s free Re:Cover service for those businesses taking out a disaster recovery service contract.