(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.

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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.

…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."

…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 area….

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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
  

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Disk-based vs. Tape Backup: The Pros and Cons All organizations use tape to back up data nightly. Tape is fairly inexpensive and low-tech, but managing and administering tape, backing up to tape and restoring files from it can be time consuming, unreliable and complex. Disk has always been an easier, more reliable alternative, but until recently its high acquisition cost has made it untouchable for many organizations. Fortunately, new disk and data reduction technologies have recently converged to make disk-based backup available at about the same price of tape backup systems.

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Consider the Herculean efforts today to protect the network from threats: Intrusion prevention systems scan packets for potentially damaging content; email security systems check for viruses in email content and firewalls block unsolicited connections. To stop the onslaught of threats to corporate and government networks, a host of software and appliances are being deployed daily . In general, these border police applications are doing a fairly decent job of stopping unauthorized intrusion at the door to your network.

But what about organizational insiders? Which applications or appliances are scrutinizing the information being passed out of the network? Intrusion prevention systems and firewalls aren’t looking for intellectual property sliding out the door right under their virtual noses. Specifically in healthcare organizations, what about patient information sent unprotected over the Internet to another provider? Add in the always-changing regulatory environment, and security is a unique challenge. All it takes is one misstep to compromise sensitive information. These are legitimate, authorized users communicating in an above-board way – but potentially exposing sensitive data in the process. This is the core of the immensely complex problem of data loss.

To address the data loss problem, organizations need to focus now on content filtering and blocking of electronic communications leaving the network – and not just email, but instant messaging (IM), webmail, HTTP and FTP communications as well . All avenues of electronic communication need to be policed to prevent intellectual property, financial information, patient information, personal credit card data, and a variety of sensitive information (depending on the business and the industry) from falling into the wrong hands.

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The global enterprise has a voracious appetite for data, and little patience for downtime. According to a recent Forrester report, 82 percent of larger IT organizations rated improving recovery time as a “critical” or “very critical” business priority. The need for continued focus and investment is clear, especially when you consider that data-at-rest in enterprises is growing at a compounded rate of 55 percent a year. Moving all that data is a mounting challenge, and business simply cannot wait.

 

To meet these growing demands at a reasonable cost, organizations are moving to IP-based networks; 70 percent of North American and 79 percent of European organizations use some combination of the Internet, MPLS or Ethernet to connect to their primary backup datacenter. Bandwidth prices may be in decline, but that doesn’t mean it comes cheap. Bandwidth, on average, is 29 percent of the total cost of replication, backup and recovery solutions, and is often constrained by the effects of latency.

 

 

 

End-to-end plans for turning disaster recovery into full business continuity are very complex, but from an IP-network perspective it can be reduced to three main challenges.

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Disaster plan need to take into account mainframes, blade servers as well as distributed file servers.  The problem is more complex as enterprises slowly move away from IT and Business alignment towards IT and Business convergence.  For example, 3mMainframes continue to hold their own against the onslaught of distributed server architectures, not because they are considered superior to newer technologies but because they still have a unique role to play in the enterprise. Recent market research indicates that 90 percent of mainframe users see the devices as long-term data hub and transaction server solutions fully suited to expected future workloads, particularly in SOA and Web services endeavors. Distributed servers, meanwhile, are likely to appeal to specialized shops with low MIPS requirements.

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 (Computerworld) The deadly shootings of 32 people by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech one year ago on Wednesday galvanized college campuses nationwide, leading to a surge in new mass emergency communications purchases -- especially wireless text messaging technologies.

University police and IT and communications professionals from around the nation said in recent interviews that the killings of Virginia Tech students and faculty on the Blacksburg, Va., campus by gunman Seung-Hui Cho led to a buying spree of new communications technologies and services. The goal was to bolster the capabilities of existing e-mail and voice-mail systems, as well as outdoor sirens.

The Virginia Tech shootings heightened our awareness of additional ways to disseminate crucial information -- including the use of text messaging because of its popularity with college students, said the president-elect of The Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA) and an IT professional at Columbia University in New York. a flurry of activity has ensued in the past year, she added, with both large and small colleges evaluating their emergency communications needs.

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One of the best ways an IT professional can ensure effective data protection for his company is to first understand the trends and best practices of his peers. The pressures driving organizations to develop specific data protection strategies are unrelenting.

Survey results show the top eight drivers for data protection in 2008 are:

• Capacity and utilization planning
• Faster business continuity and disaster recovery
• Disk-based backup
• Protecting virtual machines
• Improving Recovery Speed
• Going Green with deduplication and virtual tape libraries (VTL)
• Storage Security & Data Encryption
• Regulatory compliance dictates more capacity, content tools, and care

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Consider that the majority of your data, between 80 to 90 percent, resides on file servers. Now think about how you are controlling access to those shares. Most organizations find themselves with overly permissive access controls. Employees join and leave the organization frequently, and roles, responsibilities and project teams change quickly as well. All this leads to more access permission granted than revoked, since it is nearly impossible to manually keep up with the changes. The result is that most folders on file shares are oversubscribed in terms of access by well over 70%. By fixing broken access control to your file servers, you can significantly reduce the probability of data misuse in your environment.

Any program to reduce the probability of data loss and misuse has to start with rightful and warranted access controls. Ensuring that only the right people can get to the right data at all times not only reduces the odds of misuse, it also makes any subsequent safeguards and loss prevention techniques more cost effective and pragmatic to deploy. Consider a folder containing confidential data. If it is open to everyone or to a large number of individuals then (1) anyone can access and misuse the data, and (2) access by everyone must be monitored and audited – which is not a realistic undertaking. Alternatively, limiting access to those who actually need the data, and reporting on their access patterns, is realistic and a practical way to ensure that data access permissions are not abused. more info