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Disaster Plan - Business Continuity Template Meets Sarbanes-Oxley Mandated Requirements

08/25/2010 

The Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template version 4.3 has just been released.  Janco contiues to update its templates to meet the ever changing requirements of the business environment.

With this new version a fully indexed PDF copy of the template is now provided in addition to the two versions of WORD (2003 and 2007). 

The updates to the template included:

1.      Defined generic metrics for DR/BC success

2.      Business & IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire Updated

3.      Updated references to DRP card

4.      Updated formatting to meet WORD 2007 requirements

 

The version history for updates to template can be seen at http://www.e-janco.com/drpversion.htm and the full Table of Contents with sample pages can be downloaded at http://www.e-janco.com/Register_drp.asp .

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Solid State Disk (SSD) is an opportunity for CIOs

08/18/2010 

While SSD represents a premium in storage capacity, it's well worth it if it improves storage response time to users and critical applications.

Data storage managers are making moves toward solid-state storage and solid-state drives (SSDs), with 14% of 360 survey respondents planning to implement them this year and nearly 40% planning to evaluate them this year (in addition to the 7% who already have them in place). Those numbers mean that right now Many CIOs could use help in comparing SSD vs. HDD and determining what value they'd get from implementing SSD to fix performance problems. This is a role that's tailor-made for an operation's manager and represents an excellent value-add opportunity.

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Security Threats Increase

08/13/2010 

In its recently released "2010 Midyear Security Report," Cisco Systems Inc. noted "an uptick in generalized SQL injection attacks, culminating with a June 2010 re-emergence of Asprox [a Trojan that wrought havoc on the United Kingdom government and computer systems two years ago]."

Security Procedures

Analysis "revealed that attackers had begun reconnaissance sweeps looking for susceptible SQL servers starting in late March 2010," blogged a market intelligence manager for ScanSafe, a Web security solution provider Cisco acquired last December.

Reconnaissance sweeps, which can indicate network mapping, are normal when generated from in a network. The same activity generated from outside a network is suspect, especially as about 51 percent of the injected malware is installed by a remote attacker, the Verizon report said.

Attackers will use different methods to get into a system, with numerous gambits exploiting Web browsers. "In so-called man-in-the-browser attacks, cyber attackers can exploit the ability of browsers to access the network stack on the host machines and get to the data before it’s been encrypted - that’s the goal," said the Enterprise Management Associates managing research director.

Search engine results pages play a significant role in driving traffic to compromised Web sites. During the first quarter of 2010, the Cisco report said, "7.4 percent of all Web-based malware encounters resulted from search engine queries, and nearly 90 percent of all Asprox encounters in June 2010 were the result of links in search engine results page."

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Rules for avoiding man made disasters

08/07/2010 

The best way to prepare for a disaster is to avoid the disaster. Look for any potential problems you can find and correct them. You should address those issues that you can solve and which will provide benefit.

DRP Security Template

  • Maintain good general housekeeping: Keep areas clean and free of obstructions and fire hazards. Remove any stored paper from common areas and store in restricted areas. Consider implementing a “clean desk policy”. In the same way that a large city phone directory does not burn as easily as loose paper, removing loose paper from desk tops to files at the end of the work day can reduce losses due to fire. This will also help to protect those documents from sprinkler discharge and other incidents.
  • Look for, and eliminate, any obviously overloaded electrical circuits. Employees may have installed non-business electrical appliances such as coffeepots, radios, space heaters and fans. These appliances can cause electrical fires by shorting out themselves or overloading circuits not designed for these appliances. Your facilities or building maintenance staff may be able to help you educate your staff regarding the problems these appliances can cause.
  • Observe physical security procedures in your facility, and encourage increased security when appropriate. Questions to ask include; is your building open to the public? If you have restricted access, is “tailgating” allowed? If tailgating is not allowed, does it occur anyway?
  • Observe information security procedures regarding computers in your facility, and encourage increased security when appropriate. Questions to ask include Does your staff have their passwords taped to their monitors? Are your laptop computers secured at the end of the workday? Does your staff leave their computers logged on to the network when they are away from their desks for extended periods such as lunch?
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Availability of e-mail a business continuity issue

07/24/2010 

Availability of e-mail for business continuity and associated data can impact an organization's ability to make or break a profit objectives -- as well as retain or lose customers. In today's economy, the importance of e-mail takes on new meaning. Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) are no longer general rules. The Exchange administrator's ability to meet or exceed the proverbial lines in the sand, in terms of time to recover and the age of the data recovered, can mean the difference between gainful employment and prepping for a job interview.

Questions that you need to have answers to are:

  • What is the the impact of e-mail downtime on today's business,
  • What are the types of potential failures -- both the common and the not-so-common along with the general probability of occurrence, and
  • How do you plan to mitigate the impact of these challenges to ensure adequate levels of protection for your e-mail environment.
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CIO Strategic Planning Guidelines

07/13/2010 

CIOs now are starting to develop new information technology strategies.  As they do that, they need to include understanding the fundamental business and operational trends that are driving businesses and enterprises of all types to redesign their operations.  The principles that CIOs need to keep in mind are:

  • Flexibility - CIOs must be able to respond to opportunities and challenges faster than ever before. These CIOs are usually battling well-resourced organizations that may be based where the opportunity originated, or another globalizing company that is reaching out for new opportunities. In order to compete, a CIO must create a strategy this helps the enterprise to deliver faster a product or service as good, or better, than that of potentially any other company in the world.
  • Simplicity - The increase in technology has led to increased complexity. While per unit costs of technology are decreasing, in aggregate IT budgets continue to increase. With the pressure on IT to act less as a cost center and more as a way to increase the profitability of business units, adding more storage, more bandwidth, or additional technologies throughout the organization is no longer an acceptable approach to managing information technology. Instead, smart CIOs are investigating technologies like continuous data protection, virtualization, and wireless connectivity to help IT slim down its footprint while increasing their business's competitive advantages. Therefore, the IT team is typically in a difficult position, assessing where to cut costs while still moving forward with a plan to continually enhance IT services to the business.
  • Security and Mandated Requirements - With the growing importance of applications and data, the sources of threats to enterprise data have multiplied dramatically. Everything from natural disasters, to criminals, and corrupt sources within the company can steal or corrupt data. While CIOs do everything that they can to stop these threats in the first place, they still must be prepared to recover from these threats as quickly as possible.
  • Disaster Recovery Business Continuity - As businesses have expanded, the need for anytime, anywhere application access has become a requirement. At the same time, "follow the sun" (global 24/7) operations have shrinking maintenance windows and a need for applications to be running at all times. Delay or loss of data for any reason - system failure, natural disasters - has a domino-like effect across the entire organization, at any time of the day or night.
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Art Work In Danager - Disaster Plans Need to Address That

06/18/2010 Disaster PlanNatural disasters, such as hurricanes that assault the southern Florida and Louisiana, make all of us acutely aware of our vulnerabilities to disaster. Fortunately, catastrophes of this magnitude are rare, but disaster can strike in many ways. For example, a broken water main inundated the Chicago Historical Society; fire severely damaged the Cabildo in New Orleans; the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged several San Francisco area museums and libraries; smoke from an electrical fire covered collections throughout the Huntington Gallery; mold damage threatened Mount Vernon's archival collections. Large or small, natural or man-made, emergencies put an institution's staff and collections in danger. - more info



Backup and Retention a DRP issue

06/10/2010 

Traditional storage environments have many of the same problems as distributed server farms: applications are tied to physical devices, making any response to changing needs both disruptive and time-consuming; capacity utilization is low; and many maintenance activities require application downtime. The simple and straightforward solution is storage virtualization, which decouples applications and data from the underlying physical devices. Storage virtualization simplifies storage management, as only a single set of tools are required for a given virtualized set of similar devices, such as managing a set of disk systems.

For IT departments charged with delivering greater business value in the face of unprecedented data growth, storage virtualization is a very attractive way to control costs, improve performance and maximize resource utilization.

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HIPAA is a major compliance issue for CIOs in Heathcare

06/09/2010 

There is a high degree of mobility inherent in the work styles of most healthcare professionals, IT must remain cognizant of where critical data is being stored and what’s at risk on top of providing 24x7 productivity. In its healthcare and life sciences respondent base alone, it has been said that 89% of healthcare organizations have some percentage of their employees working away from the office at least one day per week, while 87% of healthcare organizations have some percentage of workers telecommuting from home at least one day per week, and more than 50% have some segment of workers telecommuting at least four days per week. To support this mobile work style, 95% of these enterprises have users relying on smartphones for work, usually in addition to laptop computers.

Regulatory compliance tops the list of concerns among healthcare and life sciences IT professionals with 86% of healthcare IT decision-makers rating it as a high or critical priority over the course of the coming year. Immediately following regulatory compliance is data security, with 31% of healthcare enterprises ranking it a critical priority and almost 60% ranking it as a high priority.

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Goals of a Disaster Recovery Planning Defined

05/27/2010 

The ultimate goal of Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is to get your business restarted in an acceptable timeframe. For some organizations that means within minutes, while for others it means hours or possibly days. The cost of operational downtime varies among businesses and industries. For example, financial firms often calculate that cost in millions of dollars per hour, while other industries calculate operational downtime as thousands per day. These costs include lost business transactions, employee productivity, and customers - not to mention regulatory penalties. The ability to tolerate these losses generally determines business continuity strategy.

 

There are two types of disasters:

  • Physical destruction of a location and data (or access to location and data). Examples: fire, flood, earthquake, significant power or network outage.
  • Data destruction without physical destruction. Examples: hardware failure, virus/hacker attack, software malfunction, human error.

Each if these have a different set of requirements and your Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan needs to take them into consideration.

 

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