XML and RSS News Feeds
CIO Tools - Disaster Planning - Security
Infrastructure - Job Descriptions
Causes of Disasters
03/04/2010
According to Janco Associates, the primary factor in the activiation of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans is computer hardware failure.
- more info
Google person finder may be an options to include in disaster plans
03/01/2010
Disaster plans need to include a way to contact individuals who are in the area after an event.
Google has a tool to help people locate friends and loved ones who have been affected by the 8.8.-magnitude earthquake in Chile.
Google Person Finder allows users to search for information about people by name or leave information about people in both English and Spanish. The page said it contained 22,900 records. However, the page cautions users that all data input would be viewable and usable by all and that the company plays no role in verifying the information. Google had set up a similar Person Finder tool after Haiti's recent earthquake.
- more info
IT Systems Will Soon Start to Fail on a Regular Basis
02/20/2010
There is a big crunch coming, and companies will start to experience ever greater IT failures unless they start buying new hardware.
When the recession started, IT spending fell off a cliff. Hardware and software companies are hoping that IT spending will make a strong comeback because of the pent up demand and the fact that there is a lot of aging IT gear installed today.
Most companies have extended their maintenance contracts, but, at some point, that will not be enough as IT systems start failing.
Predicting IT failure is not a hard thing to do. When you deal with tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of servers, data storage systems, network equipment, etc, it is a relatively simple statistical exercise.
The fact that IT systems are aging. Maintenance contract prices increase every year that older equipment is kept working. At some point it becomes more expensive than upgrading. And upgrading brings additional benefits such as higher performance from the latest processors and subsystems.
Currently, a large part of an organization's IT budget is being spent on regulatory compliance issues, and on security, which is related to regulatory compliance. For the executives, being in compliance means not going to jail.
But if you can't run your business IT applications reliably then being compliant becomes a moot point. So, will spending on basic IT infrastructure come roaring back this quarter? Or will companies try to eek out another few months of performance out of their aging IT systems?
- more info
Disaster Planning is Complex
02/10/2010
An increasing number of professionals know that small-scale emergencies can be contained if staff members are prepared to react quickly. Damage can be limited even in the face of a large-scale disaster. For example, cultural institutions in Charleston, South Carolina, formed a consortium that focused on disaster preparedness several years before they were hit by a hurricane. Many of those institutions sustained only minor damage because they were able to put their early warning procedures into operation.
Disaster planning is complex; the written plan is the result of a wide range of preliminary activities. The entire process is most efficient if it is formally assigned to one person who acts as the disaster planner for the institution and is perhaps assisted by a planning team or committee. The enterprise's director may play this primary role or may delegate the responsibility, but it is important to remember that the process must be supported at the highest level of the organization if it is to be effective. The planner should establish a timetable for the project and should define the scope and goals of the plan, which will depend largely on the risks faced by the enterprise.
- more info
Data protection in a state of flux
02/08/2010
The state of IT Disaster Planning and data protection is in flux. Conventional models of backup and restore have become obsolete and are being replaced by newer dynamic paradigms that involve disk-to-disk, virtual server provisioning, sophisticated data deduplication, and appliance-based operations.
Disaster Recovery Plan - Business Continuity Plan Template
ISO 27000 ( formerly ISO 17799 ) - Sarbanes-Oxley - HIPAA - PCI-DSS Compliant
Janco has identified four primary business drivers of data protection:
- more info
- Provide Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This is the traditional concern of mitigating exposure to information loss. However it has grown more complicated as 24/7, global economy, and open source have become standard business issues. Of paramount importance is overcoming the hurdles associated with backup window requirements, application performance, reliability and consistency, and recovery time.
- Streamline Process Management and Increase Productivity. As staff and resources become overburdened, companies are refocusing on process management. Easing critical pressure points is often the catalyst to surviving a difficult fiscal climate.
- Contain Storage and Server Costs. Controlling cost of operations has become a top priority for many organizations. With data growing at exponential rates, these costs can easily mushroom.
- Support IT Infrastructure Consolidation. Today's data protection architecture seems to be intrinsically broken - as characterized by slow backups, complex recoveries, compromised application performance, and difficult resource administration. IT infrastructure consolidation including server virtualization magnifies the problems and elevates the rearchitecture of storage and data protection as a priority. Finding high performing, easy-to-use, scalable data protection remains a key imperative. Further, system migration of production servers and critical applications to a virtual environment are likely to be costly and painful unless an easy and minimum-impact solution to migration is built into the rearchitecture.
Which disasters should CIOs plan for?
01/19/2010
Planning for a disaster is a difficult task at best. A major provider of disaster recovery services, lists hardware problems as the number one cause of disaster, followed by power outages, hurricanes and floods. CIOs often ask "What scenarios should we prepare for?" and "How likely is it that it will happen to us?" When one thinks of disasters, big events such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 are the first come to mind. But if we look at the ultimate consequence of a disaster - downtime - we can see that any event, large or small, can have the same effect on IT infrastructure.
Certain areas of the United States have also had power supply problems in the recent past. Most notable is California with its infamous rolling blackouts. Parts of Texas also implemented rolling blackouts when there are abnormally high temperatures. Other regions of the country implement brownouts, where the voltage is reduced to customers during power emergencies. Brownouts can severely affect electronic equipment not protected with an UPS or voltage regulation device. A CIO whose data center was located in the region of California affected by the power crises said: You have to restore and operate your systems from an alternate location that has power. Obviously, that site is usually pretty far away and it is not practical to physically move systems. Moving an interconnected web of storage and servers to another set of infrastructure is a huge challenge. These things just were not designed for that kind of mobility and that is exactly the problem that virtualization solves.
- more info
Data deduplication as part of your backup strategy
01/15/2010
Traditional backup solutions create duplicate data in two ways:
- Repeated full backups
- Repeated incrementals of the same file when it changes multiple times.
A deduplication system identifies both situations and eliminates redundant files, reducing the amount of disk necessary to store your backups anywhere from 10:1 to 50:1 and beyond,
depending on the level of redundancy in your data. Deduplication systems also work their magic at the subfile level. To do so, they identify segments of data (a segment is typically smaller than a file but bigger than one byte) that are redundant with other segments and eliminate them. The most obvious use for this technology is to allow users to switch from disk staging strategies (where theyre storing only one nights worth of backups) to disk backup strategies (where theyre storing all onsite backups on disk).
There are two main types of deduplication. Target dedupe systems allow customers to send traditional backups to a storage system that will then dedupe them; they are typically used in medium to large datacenters and perform at high speed. Source dedupe systems use different backup software to eliminate the redundant data from the very beginning of the process and serve to back up remote offices and mobile users.
- more info
What is new in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
01/06/2010
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning (DRP / BCP) is not new - many organizations have employed some form of (DRP / BCP) for quite some time.
Companies have been replicating their mainframe, storage, and database systems for years. Before that, they moved paper documents to offsite locations.
So, what' s new with DRP / BCP?As business technology proliferated over the past 10 to 15 years, DRP / BCP coverage expanded from back office systems to all types of additional business applications.
New business applications and IT services help organizations react quickly to a dynamic marketplace and provide access to information - wherever and whenever it's needed. Areas of concern include:
- more info
- Companies are reducing the overall number of data centers, consolidating remote and branch office assets in the process.
- E-mail, instant messaging, IP telephony, and collaboration applications have become integral parts of many companies business processes.
- Given the volume of users accessing information, securing the environment is crucial. Allowing unauthorized users to access classified information or failing to protect data in flight could result in significant security breaches.
Tape Versus Disk for Data Retention
12/03/2009
Long-term data retention includes weekly, monthly or other long-term backup, primary backup copy of data, off-line copy of static or fixed content data, archive and strategic data preservation. The emphasis is on low cost, long-term durability, compatibility, and energy efficiency for lengthy data retention. Tape is leveraged as a high performance bulk storage medium to off-load the disk cache, boosting the effectiveness and utilization of disk-based systems. From a green and economic efficiency standpoint, data staged off-line to tape consumes no energy while enabling exceptional performance during bulk restore operations. The combination results in both very green and economically efficient storage in addition to supporting business sustainability and enabling compliance.
A tape copy operation may be made locally and then physically transported to another location for safe off-site storage, or data may be replicated as part of the backup and data protection process to a remote VTL or tape library where a removable tape copy is made. Hybrid solutions also leverage diskto- disk locally with snapshots or other point-intime copies that are then replicated to another location or to a cloud-based storage managed service provider (MSP). Data and network bandwidth optimization techniques and technologies, including compression and deduplication among others, enable more data to be moved on available networks or to reduce networking requirements.
- more info
Security Breaches Are a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Concern
11/30/2009
Servers are so compact that they could be removed from the building in a briefcase. When you consider the magnitude of the IT investment, and the value of the data and applications that ride on it, you can appreciate the critical importance of protecting it from unauthorized access. This is especially true after a disaster - anyone can walk off with you enterprise's key assets.
Server enclosures provide access control options such as lock-and-key, electronic control, RFID local readers and access cards.
- more info