Disaster Recovery Plan Template
Business Continuity

Disaster Recovery News

07/24/2010
Business continuity after a terroist attack or a pandemic

Most aspects of business continuity and disaster recovery planning apply to terrorist attacks and pandemics just as much as to fires, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other natural and manmade disasters.  However, there are a number of areas that need to be re-visited because of the uniqueness of these types of interruptions. 

• Communication - While communication is important in any disaster recovery scenario, it is particularly critical in the event of a terrorist attack or a pandemic. Employees and their families may be personally threatened, and they may be exposed to rumors and panics, it is particularly important that they receive accurate, up-to-date information on safety and health issues. Employees also need detailed information on company policies and procedures for working in the new environment, and open communication channels to company officials to help resolve personal and work-related issues in high-stress situations.
• Security and Connectivity - Enterprises must plan to provide secure and reliable access to corporate networks for employees who work in their homes, hotels, or other remote locations. Administrators must have a plan for distributing software to remote computers, ensuring security on computers outside of the corporate firewall, and providing backup and data encryption capabilities to mitigate the risk of mobile devices with sensitive data being lost or stolen.
• Collaboration and Re-Engineered Processes - Planners and developers must re-engineer business processes so they can continue without face-to-face interaction between employees.

 

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07/13/2010
Business continutiy defined

In the simplest of terms, it is good business for a company to secure its assets. CIO under the direction of CEOs and enterprise shareholders must be prepared to budget for and secure the necessary resources to support business continuity.

It is necessary that an appropriate administrative structure be created to effectively deal with crisis management. This will ensure that all concerned understand who makes decisions, how the decisions are implemented, and what the roles and responsibilities of participants are. Personnel used for crisis management should be assigned to perform these roles as part of their normal duties and not be expected to perform them on a voluntary basis. Regardless of the organization - for profit, not for profit, faith-based, non-governmental - its leadership has a duty to stakeholders to plan for its survival.

With the explosion of technology into every facet of the day-to-day business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.

The template comes as both a WORD document utilizing a CSS style sheet that is easily modifiable. 

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06/18/2010
Security Breaches Are a Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Concern

Servers are so compact that they could be removed from the building in a briefcase. When you consider the magnitude of the IT investment, and the value of the data and applications that ride on it, you can appreciate the critical importance of protecting it from unauthorized access.  This is especially true after a disaster - anyone can walk off with you enterprise's key assets.

Server enclosures provide access control options such as lock-and-key, electronic control, RFID local readers and access cards.  

• Keys can be matched to individual cabinets, multiple cabinets of a certain type (such as containing networking equipment, telephone company equipment or servers), or any other combination desired.
• Electronic control can provide multiple types of access, such as remote control, timed control, card reader control or a combination of all of these methods.
• Diversified access-control strategies enable you to manage access at the level of function and/or individual, while a top-level disaster recovery administrator has a master key.

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06/10/2010
Wi-Fi Proves Itself in a Disaster Area When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the only communication system that had not broken down was the wireless mesh network deployed in the downtown area to support surveillance cameras credited with reducing the citys prestorm violent-crime rate.

Today it still performs police duties, but as the lone public communications system left in the city, it also carries VoIP traffic that is the lifeline for many city businesses.

The storm wiped out wireline phone service and cellular networks, and those that it didn't destroy outright couldn't be kept up because the city could not get fuel to the backup generators needed to keep the networks running, Meffert told an audience at a session during Spring VON 2006 this week.

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05/27/2010
Email Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Requirements

 

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for email requires at least six factors to be included when the plan is created.  They are:

• Emergency backup for primary mail server
• Ability to send and receive emails
• View "some" email history
• Retain history during the recovery period
• Spam and virus filtering
• After the fact synchronization with primary email server

Based on working with thousands of customers, Janco Associates has developed a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template that includes everything that you need to create a custom Disaster Plan.

You can download a full copy of the table of contents by going to http://www.e-janco.com/Register_drp.asp.

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05/11/2010
Disaster plans are not keeping up with increased volumes Data volumes are expanding rapidly and many Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans are not keeping up.  It is estimated that over half of large US enterprises had 11 terabytes or more of unstructured data - business documents, virtual machine images, email, media files, etc. - in their environments, with annual growth rates hovering around 60%. This is compounded by a 20% or more annual growth rate for transactional data, historically the bulk of data processing. With remote office staffing levels in decline, IT's ability to track and secure these growing data sets is in jeopardy.
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04/28/2010
Business Continuity Planning Key to Business Operations

Business Continuity planning is key requirement for running any modern enterprise that takes its operations and its clients seriously. With so many potential disasters looming that can befall an organization at any time, it seems unwise not to take actions to prepare for and try to prevent the devastating impact of such catastrophes.

There is a multiplicity of benefits in planning for Business Continuity and disaster planning within your organization. Not only will your data, hardware, software, etc., be better protected, but the people that compose your organization will be better safeguarded should a disaster occur. In addition, employees will be informed and rehearsed as to what actions to take to immediately start the recovery process and ensure business continuity if disaster strikes.

Without this type of preparation any unexpected event can severely disrupt the operation, continuity, and effectiveness of your business. Disabling events can come in all shapes and varieties. They can vary from the more common calamities like hard drive corruption, building fires or flooding to the rarer, yet more severe and often longer lasting disruptions that can occur on a city-wide or even national basis; events such as disruptions in transport (oil crises, metro shut-downs, transport worker, strikes, etc.), infrastructure weakening from terrorist attacks, or even severe loss of staff due to illness like a pandemic flu. All of these strikes a blow at an organization's struggle for business continuity.

For smaller companies the impact of  even lesser disasters can hit much harder. For example, unexpected non-availability of key workers alone could be catastrophic, potentially causing as much disruption to business continuity as technological hardship, especially if it occurs during the height of the company's busy season. If only one person is trained to do particular and/or essential tasks, their unexpected absence can severely disrupt productivity.

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04/26/2010
Cloud services impact disaster planning

The typical cloud computing contract can look downright simple to an experienced IT outsourcing customer accustomed to inking pacts hundreds of pages long that outline service levels and penalties, pricing and benchmarks, processes and procedures, security and business continuity requirements, and clauses delineating the rights and responsibilities of the IT services supplier and customer.

And that simplicity, say IT outsourcing experts, is the problem with cloud computing. Failure to understand the true meaning of the cloud and to address the serious legal and contractual issues associated with cloud computing can be catastrophic. The data security issues and business continuity issues are particularly challenging, and failure to address them in the contract can expose a customer to serious business interruption and violation of mandated security requirements.

If a cloud services contract (whether it's for software, infrastructure, or platform-as a service) seems less complex, that's because it's designed to offer products and services "as is"--without any vendor representations or warranties, responsibility for adequate security or data protection, or liability for damages.

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04/22/2010
Disaster Planning and Business Continuity Best Practices

Disaster recovery and business continuity best practices - The top 7 best practices

1.       Focus on operations

2.       Train everyone on how to execute the DRP and BCP

3.       Have a clear definition for declaring when a disaster or business interruption occurs that will set the DRP and BCP process into motion -

4.       Integrate DRP and BCP with change management

5.       Focus on addressing issues BEFORE they impact the enterprise

6.       Validate that all technology is properly installed and configured right from the start

7.       Monitor the processes and people to know what critical

 

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04/16/2010
Which disasters should CIOs plan for?

Planning for a disaster is a difficult task at best. A major provider of disaster recovery   services, lists hardware problems as the number one cause of disaster, followed   by power outages, hurricanes and floods. CIOs often ask "What scenarios should we prepare for" and "How likely is it that it will happen to us" When one thinks of disasters, big events such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 are the first come to mind. But if we look at the ultimate consequence of a disaster - downtime - we can see that any event, large or small, can have the same effect on IT infrastructure. 

Certain areas of the United States have also had power supply problems in the recent past. Most notable is California with its infamous rolling blackouts. Parts of Texas also implemented rolling blackouts when there are abnormally high temperatures. Other regions of the country implement brownouts, where the voltage is reduced to customers during power emergencies. Brownouts can severely affect electronic equipment not protected with an UPS or voltage regulation device. A CIO whose data center was located in   the region of California affected by the power crises said: You have to restore   and operate your systems from an alternate location that has power. Obviously, that site is usually pretty far away and it is not practical to physically move systems. Moving an interconnected web of storage and servers to another set of   infrastructure is a huge challenge. These things just were not designed for that kind of mobility and that is exactly the problem that virtualization solves.

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