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Business continuity planning for a Pandemic
10/25/2009
- more infoLarger corporations typically can continue business as usual even while many employees are out sick in a Pandemic. However Business Continuity Planning at small firms rely heavily on key individuals and find themselves nearly incapacitated if several of those key people get sick, must stay home with sick children, or are in areas put under quarantine.
At a minimum, small business owners should update employees' contact information to include current home phone numbers and addresses, e-mail addresses, and cell phone numbers. Some employers establish phone trees so they can efficiently contact all their employees to check on and alert them during an emergency.
Another vital component to a business continuity plan is to collect contact information, including cell phone numbers, for their suppliers, vendors, and key customers. Keep this information in print and online, and store copies off-site in case you can't get into your office.
A host of legal and medical questions may arise for small business owners if swine flu roars back with a vengeance this fall.
Imagine you run a small business like a day-care center, where vulnerable children congregate and colds and flu are prevalent. Do you close and send your entire staff and all children home at the first sign of any flu? Do you send home only sick children and sick staff? When? When do you reopen or allow them to return? What information and medical clearance would you need to send staff or children home, allow them to return, close, or reopen the center? These are not easy questions.
Janco recommends that companies prepare for operational disruptions by doing employee cross training or lining up backup staff now. Employers should review and enhance existing emergency disaster plans to ensure business continuity. Employers that are just getting started should develop a plan that includes pandemic preparedness, and review it and conduct drills regularly. A checklist for flu policy is posted at the government's flu awareness Web site.
Aside from preparing and practicing for pandemic, small business owners may want to check with their attorneys for advice on unusual situations -- What do you do with employees who are medically vulnerable to the flu or those with young children or elderly relatives at home? Do you send them home? When and for how long? With pay?
The federal Family Medical Leave Act provides eligible employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for themselves or sick family members. Generally, FMLA regulations do not cover flu absences unless complications arise, but courts recently have interpreted the FMLA to mandate leave for the flu and other viral infections.
However, the federal law does not cover firms with fewer than 50 employees. Small employers usually do not have to provide sick leave, so it is a surprise to many employees that they are not entitled to any sick leave, much less any paid sick leave.
Another question for your human resources manager and/or attorney is what communications responsibility you have as a business owner if one of your employees is diagnosed with swine flu. There are health confidentiality and privacy issues for employees, so employers should not disclose personal health information. But employers do not want a modern day Typhoid Mary spreading swine flu at work. If there is an employee with confirmed swine flu, some employers are alerting employees that there may be swine flu exposure at work without identifying the involved employee.
You might need to think about giving an infected person's immediate co-workers enhanced sick leave to protect themselves or family members, particularly if they have particular medical vulnerability to the illness, he says. Some employers bring in cleaning crews to disinfect an office where swine flu has been found. Providing hand disinfectant for employees is not a bad idea.
Cloud Recovery Not Easy - Disaster Recovery Not Under User Control
10/19/2009
Microsoft officials still have not provided many details about what caused the outage, other than to say it was a core system failure. The failure is unrelated to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and/or Microsoft's Azure datacenters, as the company has continued to run the Sidekick back-end on the same infrastructure it has been running on before Microsoft acquired the company in 2008.
The Microsoft/Danger team apologized for the amount of time they are taking to restore contacts, photos, e-mail and other Sidekick services to which users lost access at the start of the month. The team said they were taking their time "to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."
The team still is not committing to an exact recovery timetable, but is saying restoration should begin this week. Microsoft said, "We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter."
After telling users that they likely had lost all of their personal data, the Microsoft/Danger team then said they expected to be able to recover some of their data. Mid-weeklast week, they said they expected to recover "most if not all" of the missing user data.
What is a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events - whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CIO's involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency.
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Cloud is not as secure as many thought
10/17/2009
T-Mobile and Microsoft Sidekick is a set of exterior shells (for mobile phones) that can be personalized and provides the capability to record, play and share videos: record videos using the camera; receive video attachments from e-mail, picture messaging, or side load videos to the microSD card; play video using the built-in media player; share videos via e-mail, Bluetooth or picture messaging.
Sidekick failed and lost user data. On the face of it, there are some obvious lessons to be learned from the Sidekick snafu, even as Microsoft Corp. reported today that most of the data that was missing will be recovered from servers at its Danger Inc. subsidiary.
The lessons learned are:
- Back up your mobile phone's critical data independently - on a laptop, a desktop or a thumb drive.
- Raise questions about cloud computing and related services.
- Find out how your mobile device stores data, and make sure you understand it.
The Sidekick incident should serve as a reminder to users to back up critical data. You cannot rely on cloud services to be 100% available all the time.
Not only is a backup of critical data imperative, users need to have a way to retrieve the backed-up data. CIOs need to think about the value of the data and what happens if the service is not available. There are many Internet-based services that can be a second backup version to the original backup, such as Plaxo. Having the second one drastically reduces the odds of total loss.
At larger companies, data backups are commonplace and often include information contained on wireless phones as well as desktop computers, analysts said. The issue becomes more difficult when IT shops trust users who put critical company data on personally-owned wireless phones that aren't backed up.
Despite urging users to back up critical data, Staten joined three other analysts in remaining faithful to the mobile phone industry's strong push for cloud computing services, noting that the Sidekick case was relatively isolated.
Nearly every major smartphone provider is working on some version of cloud computing to back up data from smartphones and other cell phones. All those services could be vulnerable to data loss, and the Sidekick example is likely to prompt a broad re-examination of internal server backup procedures.
One added is risk is that backend services open enterprisees up to having data potentially lost, stolen or replicated somewhere that enterprises do not have knowledge of.
Imagine if this happened across an entire carrier's servers. For Verizon Wireless that could be 90 million people. Everybody should think twice if these services could really save your data up in the cloud.
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Improve your RTO and RPO
10/05/2009
How long can your Enterprise afford to be without your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to answer this question. Download this outline learn how the Janco Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template can reduce RPOs and RTOs even more.
Disaster Recovery Guide
Business Continuity PlanningISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant
What is Disaster Recovery and how does the Disaster Recovery Planning Template help?
This DRP Template can be used for any sized enterprise.
The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The complete package includes:
- Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Template
- Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
- Work Plan
- Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program
With lost data being a competitive liability, there is no room for downtime in today's business world.
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Huge Waves - Office Buildings and Businesses Demolished
10/01/2009
- more infoA series of tsunamis smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa killing possibly more than 100 people, some washed out to sea, destroying office buildings and homes, and injuring hundreds. Television images showed offices and homes ripped apart, cars submerged in the sea or lodged in trees and large fishing boats hurled ashore by the waves generated by a 8.0 magnitude quake southwest of American Samoa.
A second 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra late.
Disaster officials said the toll may reach 100 as rescuers search for bodies in flattened villages along the southern shore of the island of Upolu. Twenty villages on Upolu's south side were reportedly destroyed, including Lepa, the home of Samoa's prime minister. The area is also the main tourist area, and the waves destroyed some resorts. In neighboring American Samoa at least 24 people were killed and 50 injured with the southern portion of the main Tutuila island "devastated". The death toll there may also rise, said officials.
Huge Waves, Buildings Demolished
The waves that hit Pago Pago village were about 20 feet high. Some buildings were demolished by the waves, you know, there are no buildings anymore except the foundation. In addition, the island of Tonga was hit by a 13-foot wave on its northern coast. Tongan officials confirmed seven people were killed, while three were missing late on Wednesday.
Small tsunamis also reached New Zealand, Hawaii, and Japan.
Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami brought a lot of sand onshore. The Samoan resort Sea Breeze on the Southside of Upolu was destroyed when the waves hit it. The restaurant just floated out to sea complete, until it was smashed up in the water.
Disater Plan Manual - CIO and CSO conflict
09/19/2009
When the task of disaster recovery planning (DRP) is dropped in the laps of information security managers and IT staff, DRP becomes a security problem. If the disaster plan is handed off to an organization's information security officer or IT director with little or no support, the result is usually either a set of a few policies and procedures without a solid foundation in risk assessment, or a long-winded document that overreaches and focuses on the wrong issues.
When this happens, the disaster recovery plan often does more harm than good. Thinking that disaster recovery is assured by a novice's tape backup rotation plan and off-site storage in a cabinet down the hall could lead to overconfidence, false statements during audits or contract negotiations, or even encourage risky data, network, and service management behavior. Mixing up a data, recovery procedure for a full-blown plan or inflated data-focused plan into a management policy and standards is dangerous stuff for the livelihood of a business.
Worse, there is the possibility that minimal action on the part of the CIO and IT to protect information assets will cause senior management to cool its support for enterprise risk management, disaster recovery and business continuity. Organizations making the transition from small to medium size occasionally check disaster recovery off the list when they have information asset-preservation policies, and neglect to scale up disaster response decisions and processes where they concern human safety.
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A disaster occurs -- now what?
09/12/2009
A disaster or business interruption occurs, what do you do? A quick roadmap to follow is:
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Disasters can occur any where at any time
08/30/2009
Disasters are unpredictable by nature and can strike anywhere at anytime with little or no warning. Recovering from one is expensive and time consuming, particularly for those who have not taken the time to think ahead and prepare for such possibilities.
Janco has found that 80% of all enterprises that do not have a disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place before a disaster occurs never reopen. However, when disaster strikes, those who have prepared and made recovery plans survive with comparatively minimal loss and/or disruption of productivity.
Disasters can take several different forms. Some primarily impact individuals -- e.g., hard drive meltdowns -- while others have a larger, collective impact. Disasters can occur such as power outages, floods, fires, storms, equipment failure, sabotage, terrorism, or even epidemic illness. Each of these can at the very least cause short-term disruptions in normal business operation. But recovering from the impact of many of the aforementioned disasters can take much longer, especially if organizations have not made preparations in advance.
Most of us recognize that these potential problems as possibilities. Unfortunately the randomness of some of these disasters lulls some organizations into a sense of false security-"that's not likely to happen here." However, if proper preparations have been made, the disaster recovery process does not have to be exceedingly stressful. Instead the process can be streamlined, but this facilitation of recovery will only happen where preparations have been made. Organizations that take the time to implement disaster recovery plans ahead of time often ride out catastrophes with minimal or no loss of data, hardware, or business revenue. This in turn allows them to maintain the faith and confidence of their customers and investors.
Disaster Recovery Planning is the factor that makes the critical difference between the organizations that can successfully manage crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed, and those that are left picking up the pieces for untold lengths of time and at whatever cost providers decide to charge; organizations forced to make decision out of desperation.
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Network Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity CIO's Concern
08/26/2009
To add to the pressure, network operations teams are expected to run larger networks that have become many times more important to the business, and to do so with fewer staff members. These conditions exacerbate the problems associated with disparate disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
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State of Texas disaster recovery plan in jeopardy
08/20/2009
Disaster planning for the State of Texas has been put in jeopardy with the delay in the signing of contracts for seven of the state’s agencies. The 7-year contract, signed in 2007, calls for data-center operations for 27 separate state agencies to be consolidated into two new facilities with the objectives being enhanced security and lower costs, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
In addition, high-profile data breaches involving state systems last year led to the suspension of the data-center consolidation project until IBM could prove to the state that necessary security measures were in place. As a result, seven of the state's 27 agencies have still not signed off on IBM's proposed plan for managing data backup, which could lead to additional delays.
Adding to IBM's challenge on this project are the results of a survey of the IT directors for the state agencies: 88% said they are dissatisfied with the services IBM has been providing.
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