|
Contact Us
Disaster
Planning
IT Productivity
Center
|
 |
Disaster Recovery, IT
Service Management,
IT Job Description, Sarbanes Oxley,
and IT Salary
July 22nd, 2008
Seven Steps to a Working Contingency Plan
There are seven steps that can be followed
according to the Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template published by
Janco Associates. They
are:
1. Acknowledge that at disaster can
occur
2. List and prioritize the risks your enterprise faces from each disaster
threat
3. Inventory your enterpriseÂ’s technology and operational
structure
4. Inventory your enterpriseÂ’s technology
assets
5. Define the necessary service levels your enterprise and its
customers need
6. Develop a plan to operate during and after the
disaster
7. Test the plan that you have created
-
more info
July 18th, 2008
Disaster Planning at Colleges and Universities Are a Focus of Many
Colleges and universities across the United States are moving
quickly to adopt text messaging as their first line of emergency notification,
experts said.
 The rush to find ways to send tens of
thousands of SMS messages to student cell phones has been intensified becasue
all of the recent on campus incidents.
However, these incidents are not the only recent incentive for
schools to look for ways to reach their students in an emergency. Other reasons
include weather emergencies, especially in the South where hurricane evacuations
are almost an annual event.
And, of course, there's the fact that the U.S. Department of
Education requires colleges and universities to have the means to reach their
students in a timely manner in times of crisis. The question for university
administrators has always been what is the best way to notify students, and in
many cases, that boils down to e-mail, since virtually every student has a
school e-mail account. The problem is, as Virginia Tech found to its sorrow,
that e-mail is rarely an adequate solution.
-
more info
July 6th, 2008
Floods Cause Many Firms to Go Out of Business
(Computerworld) - As historic floodwaters start to receded along the
Mississippi and other Midwestern rivers, local businesses in affected
communities like Cedar Falls, Iowa, were busy assessing the impact on IT
equipment and whether disaster recovery plans stood the test.
A maker of computer games in Cedar Falls, may be permanently displaced after
Cedar River floodwaters reached 6 feet in its administrative offices and 5.5
feet in an adjoining warehouse. The company sustained about $250,000 in damage
to inventory.
The firm's president said all 65 employees are now working temporarily in
borrowed offices in three facilities.
As the floodwaters approached on June 9, employees scurried to save 120 PCs,
80 monitors and eight servers. Three high-end printers could not be removed in
time.
The company plans to revise his disaster recovery plan. "When a river comes
up 6 feet higher than it ever has before, it's tough to have that foresight,"
they said. "But it is probably going to happen again."
A software development company has plans to deal with
tornados and electrical outages, but executives never dreamed they would have to
contend with the Cedar River surpassing 500-year-flood levels. "Going through
this experience [will] make those plans [more] than just part of an IT
checklist," he said.
A key lesson learned was that companies must prepare for employees to miss
work to help families and communities after natural disasters.
-
more info
June 10th, 2008
British Oppose Disaster Planning Law
BBC: Environmental groups are
campaigning against planning
laws they claim will lead to "faceless bureaucrats" taking decisions on
major projects. Opponents of the government's Planning Bill say it sweeps away
local accountability for developments such as motorways and airports. Instead,
they want people to have more say on the decisions that affect
them.
The government says planning laws need reform to
meet long-term challenges, such as those posed by climate change. The bill,
currently going through Parliament, aims to replace the current system of
holding a sometimes lengthy and expensive public inquiry each time a major
infrastructure project is proposed, such as an airport or a power
station.
Â…People living near the proposed projects would
have limited opportunities to object. The government argues that the reform is
needed to ensure the planning system can "meet the long-term challenges we face
as a society."
Â…But the Planning Disaster Coalition, which
include Friends of the Earth, the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect
Rural England says the change will make a "mockery" of democracy, by taking away
the rights of people to have their say on developments in their local
areaÂ….
-
more info
May 28th, 2008
Ways to Enhance Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Threre a a number of ways in which an enterpriser can add value in their
disaster recovery capabilities. For example, storage vendors are enhancing their
replication capabilities, tools for rapid recovery for databases and core
applications like Exchange are finding their way into organizations of all
sizes, and virtualization has opened new disaster recovery opportunities to a
wide range of organizations.
However, before placing the technology cart before the horse, a critical
phase in any form of disaster recovery planning and design is to establish a
solid understanding of applications and their interdependencies. A good initial
step in this process is the establishment of a disaster recovery application
inventory.
What should such an inventory include? While requirements can vary depending
on the organization, a basic listing should include the following items:
- Application name and description
- Business function -- the business unit or functional area the application
supports
- Business process -- the specific business process supported
- Recovery objectives -- stated recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery
point objective (RPO) targets for the application
- Known related applications -- this includes both applications that act as
sources and targets in the business process
- Server details -- a list of the actual servers, both physical and virtual,
on which the application resides, along with configuration details
- Storage details -- the actual storage devices and logical unit numbers
(LUN) allocated to the servers
- Software requirements -- specific information about the
software
-
more info
|
RSS News Feeds
-
Janco
- IT Productivity Center
- ejobdescription
- psrinc
- IT-Toolkits
|
