Consider this, almost 40% of small businesses that close due to a disaster event never re-open. What would you do if the building your business is located within was damaged or destroyed in a disaster? Where would you go to continue providing your customers with your business services? Would you be prepared and have the correct resources, databases, contact information and other necessary items to adapt to these changes? Having a disaster plan that identifies these important items will help ensure your business is prepared to survive during unexpected and difficult times!

    

As historic floodwaters start to recede along the Mississippi and other Midwestern rivers, local businesses in affected communities like Cedar Falls, Iowa, are 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.

more info

Amazon suffered some disaster recovery and business continuity issuse as online shoppers struggled to enter Amazon.com's main e-commerce site for the second time in two days.

Only about 30% of visitors managed to enter Amazon.com, according to mobile and Internet management firm which tracks Web site performance.

The problem was not limited to the US as Amazon's U.K. storefront had similiar problems.

The U.K. site first experienced problems when its availability dropped as low as 38%.

     

Amazon said, "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites. Amazon is working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Average load times jumped to 15 seconds versus 6 seconds.

During the period of site unavailability most shoppers having access problems got the cryptic error message "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable, which means little to nontechnical people. That message indicates that whatever caused the problem proved hard to isolate, making it impossible for the company to configure its system to trigger a more intelligible alert acknowledging the problem in plain English.

The more complex a system is, the more challenging it is to maintain, and a configuration problem here can cause problems somewhere else.

more info

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. more info

Whether backing up remote data onto centralized tape or disk backup systems, or replicating company assets between redundant data centers, wide-area data services (WDS) solutions enable organizations to move data between sites without the constraints of distance and throughput. One optimization system accelerates applications typically by five to 50 times and in some cases up to 100 times faster than conventional transport mechanisms with up to a 95% reduction in WAN bandwidth utilization.   

more info

(Computerworld) Disaster planning traditionally focuses on three variables: data center replication, building design and backups. Analysts have maintained for years that the most common disaster is outright hardware failure because of faulty data center design, for instance, when the emergency power off button is hit, either accidentally or on purpose. Yet, for many enterprises throughout the U.S., the reality is that recovery plans should be customized for whichever type of major disaster is most likely to occur in any given area.

There are really two kinds of disasters that can affect your data center, says the executive director of The Uptime Institute in Santa Fe, N.M. Those that do not affect your data center directly but do affect your region. Another is a disaster that affects your building directly; you will not recover until you recover the building. One of the most important decisions, but one that is often given little thought, is where to put the data center.

more info

Rather than add more bandwidth, or invest in expensive, dedicated storage networks, WAN optimization can improve IP network performance sufficient to turn recovery into continuity. To help meet the objectives outlined above, a WAN optimization solution must be able to do three separate tasks for true business continuity: restrict bandwidth to backup applications during the allowed window and allocate it to critical applications in the event of a disaster, overcome latency and bandwidth limitations on the wire, and provide acceleration to roaming or displaced users redirected to alternative data sources.

 

 

 

Regardless of whether the data is being replicated from a massive cabinet, over IP-based storage or off a user’s hard drive for compliance purposes, during the backup window maximum bandwidth should be available to ensure completion. This requires granular bandwidth management that can isolate applications on the network and provide a predictable, policy-based service level. Further, the solution should be able to distinguish between a user initiated file copy and one started by the backup daemon, and apply different bandwidth allocations to each.

 

 

 

Also, the solution must remove latency and protocol inefficiencies that constrain current WAN backups. Caching and compression technology combined with inline protocol optimization of commonly used file transfer protocols form a technology suite that improves the performance characteristics of a WAN, adding bandwidth and reducing the time needed to complete backups and restores. Moreover, it should be able to do this for individual devices and accommodate displaced and roaming users without the need for bulky appliances.

more info

What is the Chief Security Officer (CSO)?  The title Chief Security Officer (CSO) was first used inside the information technology department and function to identify the person responsible for IT security. At many enterprises, the term CSO is still used in this way.

The CSO title is also used in many enterprises to describe the leader of the "corporate security" function, which includes the physical security and safety of employees, facilities and assets. This individual often holds a title such as Vice President or Director of Corporate Security. Historically, corporate security and information security have been handled by separate departments.

The CSO is the executive responsible for the organization's entire security posture, both physical and digital. CSOs also frequently own or participate closely in related areas such as business continuity planning, loss prevention and fraud prevention, and privacy.

At a tactical level, technology is being infused into physical security tools, which are increasingly database-driven and network-delivered. At a strategic level, CEOs and corporate boards, motivated in part by regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and ISO 27000 (formerly ISO 17799) 27001 & 27002 standards, desire an enterprise-wide view of operational risk.

The Chief Security Officer (CSO) is responsible for overall direction of all security functions associated with Information Technology applications, communications (voice and data), and computing services within the enterprise.  At the same time the CSO must be aware of the implications of legislated requirements that impact security for the enterprise.  This includes but is not limited to Sarbanes Oxley Section 404 requirements.

The CSO has the responsibility for global and enterprise-wide information security; he/she is also responsible for the physical security, protection services and privacy of the corporation and its employees.

more info

Are you taking the right steps, or could you reduce your backup window further?

• Are you setting the right data protection goals?
• Have you established the best benchmarks?
• How can you optimize your backup model to meet your SLA’s?
• Have you projected your data growth accurately?
• Will your technology fit all your needs?

To accomplish this you should:

• Set data protection goals based on buisness needs
• Establish performance benchmarks
• Optimize backup performance to exceed your benchmarks
• Forecast the capacity needs for both hardware and software
• Build a modular data protection architecture

 

 

 

more info

GPS Track Stick is a GPS logging device.  Utilizing Global Positioning System satellites, the track stick will accurately log its location in pre-set intervals.  The GPS Track Stick works anywhere on planet earth.  Built into every GPS Track Stick is a USB 1.1 connector, which makes downloading data onto your PC a breeze.  The GPS Track Stick includes integration software that is amazing!  Data can be exported in standard HTML, EXCEL, Google Earth KML, and RTF file formats.   The data records the following parameters of the GPS Track Stick - Date, Time, Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, Speed, If the unit stopped and for what time frame, Direction of travel (N, W, E, S), GPS Fix and Signal Strength.  Settings with the included software are adjustable.  When integrated with Google Earth, the Track Stick gives the user an amazingly accurate view of where the device has been.

The GPS Track Stick device will give you an accurate (within 15 meters) historical readout of where the tracking stick has been anywhere in the world.  This is a GPS Logging device and does not track in real-time.

more info

Disaster recovery and remote backup strategies need to take into account not just technical issues, but also how to implement those strategies within the letter and spirit of applicable legislation. CFOs and CIOs need to take care that a seemingly simple plan for disaster recovery does not in turn create a potential legal disaster. A compliance-based managed services provider (CMSP) can reduce risk and cost for many businesses.
more info