Sarbanes Oxley - Disaster Recovery Template, Security Template, Safery Template

Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Kit

Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 requires that:

Enterprises have an enterprise wide security policy;
Enterprises have enterprise wide classification of data for security, risk, and business impact;
Enterprises have security related standards and procedures;
Enterprises have formal security based documentation, auditing, and testing in place;
Enterprise enforce separation of duties; and
Enterprises have policies and procedures in place for Change Management, Help Desk, Service Requests, and changes to applications, policies, and procedures.

To meet these needs the Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Resource Kit, which comes in four editions (Standard, Silver, Gold, and Platinum) contains:

Security Policies (all editions);
Threat & Vulnerability Assessment Tool (all editions);
Business & IT Impact Questionnaire Risk Assessment Tool (all editions);
Safety Program Template (all editions);
Disaster Recovery Template (all editions);
Outsourcing guide update to reflect what you vendors need to do (all editions);
Software tool to monitor key data files (all editions);
Internet and IT Job Descriptions (Silver, Gold, and Platinum Editions) and;
IT Service Management Template (Platinum Edition).

Security Manual
The plan is 178 pages and includes everything needed to customize the Internet and Information Technology Security Manual to fit your specific requirement. The electronic document includes proven written text and examples for your security plan.
View The Table of Contents And A Few Pages

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
This Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) can be used as a template for any enterprise. DRP is sent to you via e-mail in WORD and/or PDF format. Included is a 13 page Business Impact Questionnaire as well as a 3 page Job Description for the Disaster Recovery Manager.
View a the Table of Contents and sample pages [Adobe PDF]

220 Internet and IT Job Descriptions

The 220 Internet and IT Position Descriptions are in Word for Windows format. Includes positions from CIO and CTO to Wireless and Metrics Managers. View The Table of Contents And A Few Pages

The IT Service Management Template
The IT Service Management Template contains policies, standards, procedures and metrics for Change Control, Help Desk and Service Request processing. ITSM template also contains several easy to implement forms and conforms with ITIL. View The Table of Contents And A Few Pages

Practical Guide for IT Outsourcing

The guide is 91 packed pages and includes everything needed to plan for, negotiate, and manage an outsourcing process within an enterprise.
View a the Table of Contents and sample pages [Adobe PDF]

Safety Program Template
The plan is 60 pages and includes everything needed to customize the Safety Program to fit your specific requirement. The Safety was updated in December of 2004 and reflects the latest issues associated with the most recent legislation (Sarbanes Oxley).
View part of the TEMPLATE in Adobe Acrobat format

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IT Cost Control

Latest News

Issuse CIO Face in a Troubled Economic Times

CIOs face some of its greatest challenges they have ever had. All managers are under intense pressure to cut costs, and that pressure is significantly increased by the current grim economic outlook. Everywhere CIOs look there is study after study indicating that organizations are looking at reducing headcount, as well as their overall spending in 2009. In addition, many business areas are relying on IT more than ever before to help them deal with the increased competition and reduced funding. This budget crunch creates a greater need for improved efficiency and higher productivity.

Normal logic would cause a CIO to consider hunkering down and focusing on survival until business conditions improve. However, enterprises must continue to make strategic investments in Information Technology. Survival is clearly important, but by making survival your primary focus, you risk missing opportunities.

CIOs and IT organizations that position themselves for the eventual upturn will look at IT as an enabler of business efficiency and growth. In this turbulent economy, it becomes more critical to invest differently in IT. The key is to invest in areas that really improve IT efficiency and discipline. This focus will enable IT not only to survive this difficult financial period, but also to quickly shift its profile toward enabling true business growth.

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Over 70% of Lost Laptops are Never Recovered

Laptops can and do get lost or stolen. In studies conducted by several security firms, it has been found that over 50% of all lost or stolen laptops disappear at airport security checkpoints an departure gates. Unfortunately almost 70% of these laptops are never recovered.

This policy has been updated to reflect the requirements of PCI-DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and ISO. The policy comes as both a WORD file and a PDF file utilizing a standard CSS style sheet. - more

Terminating an Outsource Relationship

Enterprises can and do suffer because they do not plan for what happens when the end date of the outsourcing contract approaches. Enterprises usually omit to include a definition of procedures to be followed and assets allocated when the contract terminates.

The time to set the groundwork for the termination of an outsource contract is when the original contract is negotiated. If it is not done then, the outsourcer has no reason to do more than the contract requires.

Key issues to consider are:

Ownership of fixed assests
Ownership and return of data
Documentation and other intellectual property
Staffing turnover from outsourcer to enterprise
Support outsourcer is to provide in the turnover process

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CIO Recovery Planning Tool Kit Released

Park City, UT Park City, UT - With the recovery on the horizon, Janco Associates, Inc. has released its CIO Infrastructure Planning Tool Kit. The kit contains all of the elements that are required for CIOs to hit the ground running as the recovery starts to take hold and demand increases for IT services. The CEO of Janco, Mr. Victor Janulaitis said, "During a downturn, CIOs often had to make some unpopular decisions and that cost them the alliances they need to succeed. Based on our experience the highest attrition rates for CIOs is during a recovery. With a recovery, many enterprises feel they can afford a change at the top to get a new direction and improve the enterprise's IT operations. In order to succeed CIOs need to take proactive steps before it is too late."

Janulaitis said, "CIOs need to act well in advance of the recovery, and the end of a recession is often recognized only months after the fact. The most progressive CIOs and enterprises will turn to recovery mode before competitors by implementing a recovery plan right now."

Janulaitis added, "...Most IT functions are operating at very high productivity levels and do not have any extra capacity to use when the recovery starts. Once the recovery occurs there were be huge demand for initiatives, projects, and staffing. CIOs who react too late will find they will not be able to meet the demands placed on them."

The CIO Infrastructure Planning Tool Kit directs CIO how to get there organization in order by helping them meet several key objectives. Updating the organization infrastructure with IT Service Management (ITSM) and Metrics in mind; updating the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and how it will be applied with new initiatives; defining all of the responsibilities of the IT staff and support staff members; creating current job descriptions in place; and identifying the resources that will have to be hire (employees) or retain (contractors) once the recovery starts.

The CIO Infrastructure Planning kit comes in three versions: standard, silver, and gold. The gold version contains the IT Infrastructure, Strategy, & Charter Template, the latest Janco IT Salary Survey, the IT Service Management for SOA Template, 220 IT Job Descriptions, the Internet and IT Job Descriptions HandiGuide , and a Functional Specification Template. These templates and job descriptions all come in MS WORD and are fully editable. More information can be found at http://www.e-janco.com/CIOInfrastructurePlanningToolKit.html.

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Is your business ready to deal with management of all of its data and business records?

For most midsized and even small businesses, managing data is a major challenge. The growth of structured data from databases, e-mail and other applications, as well as file data such as PDFs, audio, video and graphics has been exponential. Furthermore, no end is in sight. According to well know reasearch firm, the need for on-line data storage capacity is increasing at a rate of nearly 58 per cent per year; by 2011, it is estimated that companies worldwide will require disk storage of more than 32,000 petabytes of data.

The increasing flood of data can lead to a host of problems, like added time and system slowdowns due to the sheer volume of data; added cost, in new equipment and especially in management overhead, to provide for all this data accumulation; and the added business risk that comes with larger data stores.

The temptation is to accommodate added data by increasing the number of servers and disk drives. But simply adding servers is not the answer in fact, without planning, the direct attachment of additional drives or servers can create islands of storage, resulting in greater management requirements. Such an unplanned and reactive approach to storage is inefficient, raising costs while limiting flexibility and the capacity to respond to new business opportunities.

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Areas Impacted by Security Policies and Procedures

Security policies and procedures need to consider areas where your systems can be breached and include:

Employee access cards
Logon codes
Computers and laptops
Routers and networking equipment
Printers
Cameras, digital or analog, with company-sensitive photographs
Data - sales, customer information, employee information
Company Smartphones/ PDAs
VoIP phones, IP PBXs (digital version of phone exchange boxes), related servers
VoIP or regular phone call recordings and records
Email
Logs of employees daily schedule and activities
Web pages, especially those that ask for customer details and those that are backed by web scripts that query a database
Web server computer
Security cameras
Access points (i.e., any scanners that control room entry)

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Legacy Infrastructure Hinders Productivity

When technologist's design and implement a "new way" to do things they often forget about how to transaction from the "legacy" system to the new one. The Washington Post reported that the Copyright Office's "new $52 million electronic process" was responsible for creating an overwhelming logjam of copyright applications.

Turnaround time for copyright applications has slowed from six to 18 months and the Copyright Office is behind some 500,000 applications.

Workers say the "new" electronic system is slow and prone to crashing. Managers say the challenge has been retraining the staff to use the system. In addition, 45% of the copyright applications are still submitted in paper format, which must be painstakingly entered by hand into the "new" electronic system.

The staff is spending so much time handling the paper applications it does not have enough time to process electronic applications, which has created delays for online claims now. It now takes six months to process electronic claims when it should take one month.

Since the problem appears to be the volume of paper applications, the office plans to raise the fees for paper applications from $45 to $65 in August while keeping the fee for electronic filing at $35.

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Vista Dead

The Microsoft urged some companies week to dump Vista deployment plans and shift to Windows 7, the operating system the company has promised to ship in the fourth quarter.

"If you're just starting your testing of Vista, with the [Windows 7] Release Candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the [Windows 7] Release Candidate, and use that going forward," said Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows business.

That same day, other Microsoft managers said work on Windows 7 should wrap up in August, which would indicate availability on new PCs and at retail stores as early as mid-October if the company uses the same pace as Windows XP eight years ago.

Microsoft delivered Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) to the public on May 4, but made it available to developers and IT professionals several days earlier.

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Metric for Troubled Economic Times

Metrics are an issue that continues to be focus as CIOs try to address the stresses placed on IT. Successful CIOs know that "business-centric" metrics (which effectively communicate the value of IT's operating activities and capital projects in terms that relate to business executives) should be the focus rather than "technology-centric" metrics (such as the number of transactions processed or the mean time between system failures). The right metrics for IT spending and its business value can help reinforce IT's position as an informed and trusted business partner.

In the current economic conditions the focus of the CIO's Metrics should be:

Increase/preserve/accelerate revenue
Decrease/avoid/delay cost
Reduce business risk
Enhance business capabilities

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Metrics CIOs Need to Implement

Few business professionals need to be convinced that information is valuable to their organizations - or that data must be carefully protected. However, as corporations accumulate increasingly greater volumes of information, protecting it efficiently and effectively becomes more complex, expensve, and difficult. At the same time as the consequences and cost of a protection failure increase as data becomes more integrated into the day-to-day operations of the enterprise. No one understands this better than the CIO, who is charged with a seemingly impossible task: hold down storage and protection costs, keep production data instantly accessible 24x7, and make sure than any information asset, no matter how obscure or seldom used, can be quickly recovered on demand. These competing agendas signal a gradual shift in emphasis from the process and technologies of information protection to the strategies and tactics necessary to quickly, easily, and comprehensively respond to and recover from any data event.

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