Disaster Recovery Planning Template

Business continuity planning for a Pandemic

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:16:35 -0600

Larger corporations typically can continue business as usual even while many employees are out sick in a Pandemic. However Business Continuity Planning at small firms rely heavily on key individuals and find themselves nearly incapacitated if several of those key people get sick, must stay home with sick children, or are in areas put under quarantine.

Phone Trees

At a minimum, small business owners should update employees' contact information to include current home phone numbers and addresses, e-mail addresses, and cell phone numbers. Some employers establish phone trees so they can efficiently contact all their employees to check on and alert them during an emergency.

Another vital component to a business continuity plan is to collect contact information, including cell phone numbers, for their suppliers, vendors, and key customers. Keep this information in print and online, and store copies off-site in case you can't get into your office.

A host of legal and medical questions may arise for small business owners if swine flu roars back with a vengeance this fall.

Imagine you run a small business like a day-care center, where vulnerable children congregate and colds and flu are prevalent. Do you close and send your entire staff and all children home at the first sign of any flu? Do you send home only sick children and sick staff? When? When do you reopen or allow them to return? What information and medical clearance would you need to send staff or children home, allow them to return, close, or reopen the center? These are not easy questions.

Backup Staff

Janco recommends that companies prepare for operational disruptions by doing employee cross training or lining up backup staff now. Employers should review and enhance existing emergency disaster plans to ensure business continuity. Employers that are just getting started should develop a plan that includes pandemic preparedness, and review it and conduct drills regularly. A checklist for flu policy is posted at the government's flu awareness Web site.

Aside from preparing and practicing for pandemic, small business owners may want to check with their attorneys for advice on unusual situations -- What do you do with employees who are medically vulnerable to the flu or those with young children or elderly relatives at home? Do you send them home? When and for how long? With pay?

Paid Sick Leave?

The federal Family Medical Leave Act provides eligible employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for themselves or sick family members. Generally, FMLA regulations do not cover flu absences unless complications arise, but courts recently have interpreted the FMLA to mandate leave for the flu and other viral infections.

However, the federal law does not cover firms with fewer than 50 employees. Small employers usually do not have to provide sick leave, so it is a surprise to many employees that they are not entitled to any sick leave, much less any paid sick leave.

Another question for your human resources manager and/or attorney is what communications responsibility you have as a business owner if one of your employees is diagnosed with swine flu. There are health confidentiality and privacy issues for employees, so employers should not disclose personal health information. But employers do not want a modern day Typhoid Mary spreading swine flu at work. If there is an employee with confirmed swine flu, some employers are alerting employees that there may be swine flu exposure at work without identifying the involved employee.

You might need to think about giving an infected person's immediate co-workers enhanced sick leave to protect themselves or family members, particularly if they have particular medical vulnerability to the illness, he says. Some employers bring in cleaning crews to disinfect an office where swine flu has been found. Providing hand disinfectant for employees is not a bad idea.

Cloud Recovery Not Easy - Disaster Recovery Not Under User Control

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:02:31 -0600

Microsoft officials still have not provided many details about what caused the outage, other than to say it was a core system failure. The failure is unrelated to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and/or Microsoft's Azure datacenters, as the company has continued to run the Sidekick back-end on the same infrastructure it has been running on before Microsoft acquired the company in 2008.

The Microsoft/Danger team apologized for the amount of time they are taking to restore contacts, photos, e-mail and other Sidekick services to which users lost access at the start of the month. The team said they were taking their time "to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."

The team still is not committing to an exact recovery timetable, but is saying restoration should begin this week. Microsoft said, "We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter."

After telling users that they likely had lost all of their personal data, the Microsoft/Danger team then said they expected to be able to recover some of their data. Mid-weeklast week, they said they expected to recover "most if not all" of the missing user data.

What is a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events - whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CIO's involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency.

Cloud is not as secure as many thought

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:28:44 -0600

T-Mobile and Microsoft Sidekick is a set of exterior shells (for mobile phones) that can be personalized and provides the capability to record, play and share videos: record videos using the camera; receive video attachments from e-mail, picture messaging, or side load videos to the microSD card; play video using the built-in media player; share videos via e-mail, Bluetooth or picture messaging.

Sidekick failed and lost user data. On the face of it, there are some obvious lessons to be learned from the Sidekick snafu, even as Microsoft Corp. reported today that most of the data that was missing will be recovered from servers at its Danger Inc. subsidiary.

The lessons learned are:

Back up your mobile phone's critical data independently - on a laptop, a desktop or a thumb drive.
Raise questions about cloud computing and related services.
Find out how your mobile device stores data, and make sure you understand it.

The Sidekick incident should serve as a reminder to users to back up critical data. You cannot rely on cloud services to be 100% available all the time.

Not only is a backup of critical data imperative, users need to have a way to retrieve the backed-up data. CIOs need to think about the value of the data and what happens if the service is not available. There are many Internet-based services that can be a second backup version to the original backup, such as Plaxo. Having the second one drastically reduces the odds of total loss.

At larger companies, data backups are commonplace and often include information contained on wireless phones as well as desktop computers, analysts said. The issue becomes more difficult when IT shops trust users who put critical company data on personally-owned wireless phones that aren't backed up.

Despite urging users to back up critical data, Staten joined three other analysts in remaining faithful to the mobile phone industry's strong push for cloud computing services, noting that the Sidekick case was relatively isolated.

Nearly every major smartphone provider is working on some version of cloud computing to back up data from smartphones and other cell phones. All those services could be vulnerable to data loss, and the Sidekick example is likely to prompt a broad re-examination of internal server backup procedures.

One added is risk is that backend services open enterprisees up to having data potentially lost, stolen or replicated somewhere that enterprises do not have knowledge of.

Imagine if this happened across an entire carrier's servers. For Verizon Wireless that could be 90 million people. Everybody should think twice if these services could really save your data up in the cloud.

Improve your RTO and RPO

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:16:00 -0600

How long can your Enterprise afford to be without your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to answer this question. Download this outline learn how the Janco Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template can reduce RPOs and RTOs even more.

Disaster Recovery Guide
Business Continuity Planning

ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant

What is Disaster Recovery and how does the Disaster Recovery Planning Template help?

This DRP Template can be used for any sized enterprise.

The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. The complete package includes:

Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Template
Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Work Plan
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program

With lost data being a competitive liability, there is no room for downtime in today's business world.

Huge Waves - Office Buildings and Businesses Demolished

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:52:12 -0600

A series of tsunamis smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa killing possibly more than 100 people, some washed out to sea, destroying office buildings and homes, and injuring hundreds. Television images showed offices and homes ripped apart, cars submerged in the sea or lodged in trees and large fishing boats hurled ashore by the waves generated by a 8.0 magnitude quake southwest of American Samoa.

A second 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra late.

Disaster officials said the toll may reach 100 as rescuers search for bodies in flattened villages along the southern shore of the island of Upolu. Twenty villages on Upolu's south side were reportedly destroyed, including Lepa, the home of Samoa's prime minister. The area is also the main tourist area, and the waves destroyed some resorts. In neighboring American Samoa at least 24 people were killed and 50 injured with the southern portion of the main Tutuila island "devastated". The death toll there may also rise, said officials.

Huge Waves, Buildings Demolished

The waves that hit Pago Pago village were about 20 feet high. Some buildings were demolished by the waves, you know, there are no buildings anymore except the foundation. In addition, the island of Tonga was hit by a 13-foot wave on its northern coast. Tongan officials confirmed seven people were killed, while three were missing late on Wednesday.

Small tsunamis also reached New Zealand, Hawaii, and Japan.

Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami brought a lot of sand onshore. The Samoan resort Sea Breeze on the Southside of Upolu was destroyed when the waves hit it. The restaurant just floated out to sea complete, until it was smashed up in the water.

Disater Plan Manual - CIO and CSO conflict

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:38:24 -0600

When the task of disaster recovery planning (DRP) is dropped in the laps of information security managers and IT staff, DRP becomes a security problem. If the disaster plan is handed off to an organization's information security officer or IT director with little or no support, the result is usually either a set of a few policies and procedures without a solid foundation in risk assessment, or a long-winded document that overreaches and focuses on the wrong issues.

When this happens, the disaster recovery plan often does more harm than good. Thinking that disaster recovery is assured by a novice's tape backup rotation plan and off-site storage in a cabinet down the hall could lead to overconfidence, false statements during audits or contract negotiations, or even encourage risky data, network, and service management behavior. Mixing up a data, recovery procedure for a full-blown plan or inflated data-focused plan into a management policy and standards is dangerous stuff for the livelihood of a business.

Worse, there is the possibility that minimal action on the part of the CIO and IT to protect information assets will cause senior management to cool its support for enterprise risk management, disaster recovery and business continuity. Organizations making the transition from small to medium size occasionally check disaster recovery off the list when they have information asset-preservation policies, and neglect to scale up disaster response decisions and processes where they concern human safety.

A disaster occurs -- now what?

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:01:42 -0600

A disaster or business interruption occurs, what do you do? A quick roadmap to follow is:

Do not panic and remain calm! When a disaster or business interruption occurs the first priority number is to ensure the safety of the employees.
Evaluate the disaster! Determine the impact on your personnel and enterprise operations, this evaluation the event is critical in making the decision to activate the disaster recovery business continuity procedures.
Communicate with everyone that can be impacted! Communicate with your team, managers, affiliates, and vendors frequently. Even if there is no status to report, do not leave anyone guessing or letting them draw their own conclusions.
Know the disaster recovery business continuity plan! Testing the Business Continuity Plan regularly helps everyone in becoming familiar with what will happen and how it will be done.
Be decisive! Once you have determined the level of disaster and everyone is safe to operate, it is time to make the decision if you need to implement the business continuity procedures or if the downtime for recovery acceptable.
Start the process! Start with recovering the most business critical systems first to restore business operations to a functional level. There should not be any question, which order which applications need to be restored first.
Lock down all backups and critical documentation! The first step to the recovery is having a set of data to recover from. This could be anything from archived tape, local disk copy, and a co-location or disaster recovery data center.
Use multiple solution paths! Assume that nothing will work and have alternatives in place
Reactivate normal operations! Once the systems are operational, the disaster is over and systems are repaired it is time to move the workloads back to where they were originally.

Disasters can occur any where at any time

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:49:03 -0600

Disasters are unpredictable by nature and can strike anywhere at anytime with little or no warning. Recovering from one is expensive and time consuming, particularly for those who have not taken the time to think ahead and prepare for such possibilities.

Janco has found that 80% of all enterprises that do not have a disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place before a disaster occurs never reopen. However, when disaster strikes, those who have prepared and made recovery plans survive with comparatively minimal loss and/or disruption of productivity.

Disasters can take several different forms. Some primarily impact individuals -- e.g., hard drive meltdowns -- while others have a larger, collective impact. Disasters can occur such as power outages, floods, fires, storms, equipment failure, sabotage, terrorism, or even epidemic illness. Each of these can at the very least cause short-term disruptions in normal business operation. But recovering from the impact of many of the aforementioned disasters can take much longer, especially if organizations have not made preparations in advance.

Most of us recognize that these potential problems as possibilities. Unfortunately the randomness of some of these disasters lulls some organizations into a sense of false security-"that's not likely to happen here." However, if proper preparations have been made, the disaster recovery process does not have to be exceedingly stressful. Instead the process can be streamlined, but this facilitation of recovery will only happen where preparations have been made. Organizations that take the time to implement disaster recovery plans ahead of time often ride out catastrophes with minimal or no loss of data, hardware, or business revenue. This in turn allows them to maintain the faith and confidence of their customers and investors.

Disaster Recovery Planning is the factor that makes the critical difference between the organizations that can successfully manage crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed, and those that are left picking up the pieces for untold lengths of time and at whatever cost providers decide to charge; organizations forced to make decision out of desperation.

Network Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity CIO's Concern

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:20:16 -0600

In addition to the lack of a consolidated disaster recovery / business continuity plan for the network management system, network operations are plagued by other problems:

Network recovery plans are impacted by unanticipated traffic growth, configuration issues; link overloads due to traffic rerouted around failed network elements, and more.
Changes may lead to undocumented side effects, so understanding the impact of changes before making them is essential for reliable network operations.
The monotonous work of making simple changes to hundreds or thousands of devices or objects is error prone and often difficult to reproduce in the recovery mode.

To add to the pressure, network operations teams are expected to run larger networks that have become many times more important to the business, and to do so with fewer staff members. These conditions exacerbate the problems associated with disparate disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

State of Texas disaster recovery plan in jeopardy

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:16:06 -0600

Disaster planning for the State of Texas has been put in jeopardy with the delay in the signing of contracts for seven of the state’s agencies. The 7-year contract, signed in 2007, calls for data-center operations for 27 separate state agencies to be consolidated into two new facilities with the objectives being enhanced security and lower costs, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

In addition, high-profile data breaches involving state systems last year led to the suspension of the data-center consolidation project until IBM could prove to the state that necessary security measures were in place. As a result, seven of the state's 27 agencies have still not signed off on IBM's proposed plan for managing data backup, which could lead to additional delays.

Adding to IBM's challenge on this project are the results of a survey of the IT directors for the state agencies: 88% said they are dissatisfied with the services IBM has been providing.

A network outage is a disaster

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:25:06 -0600

As businesses rely more heavily on the internet to transact business and link together branch offices, remote workers, customers and business partners, the WAN connection becomes more important than ever. A single pipe may be a company's only link to the outside world. If this pipe goes down, crucial networking functions come to a crashing halt. Although most business lines are reliable, outages are not very common. A software company that has over 25 branch offices, each with a T-1, in several 3^rd world locations has frequent outages. About once a month, they have a T-1 outage in one of the offices, lasting from 4 to 20 hours. During that time, that remote office is effectively cut-off. Without the WAN line, you cannot make phone calls, get e-mails or do any kind of electronic transaction. They are unable to communicate with the outside world and effectively dead in the water.

DRP Backup Solutions

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:01:24 -0600

To plan your data protection solution appropriately, you must first understand the type of technology environment that you are running. Consider the following:

Direct attached storage (DAS): The simplest backup and restore environment, DAS usually consists of a standalone tape drive or an autoloader attached directly to the server that it is protecting. Businesses that operate DAS usually require backups only daily and/or weekly, maintain only a few (one or two) networked servers on each network and do not use online business-critical operations.
Network backup: LAN/SAN-based backup storage uses devices that are managed centrally from a single console through a single backup server, reducing hardware costs, and management time. Businesses that operate LAN/SAN-based backup usually require continuous, business-critical operations as well as hourly or daily backups; have multiple networked servers; and can run multiple operating systems.

Backup is the primary Disaster Plan for Many SMBs

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:19:44 -0600

Mid-sized businesses (SMB) have long struggled to protect their IT systems. Many firms are inadequately protected and mistakenly think that a disaster is rare and will not happen to them anytime soon. Experience shows there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding regarding what disaster recovery encompasses and how to implement it effectively.

SMBs must work with limited finances infrastructure and human resources. Robust disaster recovery used to be affordable and manageable only by large enterprises. SMBs rely more on backup than on a formal disaster recovery plan. As businesses' reliance on IT has grown, backup has increasingly shown its weaknesses. However, the introduction and maturation of several key technologies, such as virtualization, have brought affordable and easily implementable DRP to small and mid-sized companies. SMBs do not always equate virtualization with DR because awareness of the many virtualization applications is just starting to grow.

Organizations that ensure survival following a disaster understand the basics of creating a good plan; however, there are many obstacles and pitfalls that they can easily avoid. 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.

Disaster Plan Common Failures

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:41:27 -0600

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity - Common Failures

Most common mistakes made in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are eliminated by implementing the Janco Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template. Problems that are avoided are:

Failure to identify every potential event that can jeopardize the infrastructure and data that your enterprise depends
Failure to cross-train personnel in disaster recovery and business continuity
Failure to create a communication processes which will work when your communication infrastructure is lost
Failure to have adequate backup power
Failure to know which resources need to be restored first
Failure to have adequate physical documentation of your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan
Failure to validate the adequacy of your back ups
Failure to test your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan
Failure to have passwords available to the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity team
Failure to keep your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan up to date

Minimun and Standard Power Protection for Workstations for DRP and BCP

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:35:22 -0600

Personal computers and remote servers often are damaged by subtle anomalies that users never see, such as sags, surges, spikes, brownouts, line noise, frequency variation, switching transients and harmonic distortion. A business on typical utility power is subjected to these hidden power problems every day and complete outages several times a year. Solutions that you should implement for all such equipment include:

Minimum - Surge suppressors address the power surges, but have no effect on the under-voltage and variance conditions that can erode equipment health over time or zap it in an instant.
Standard - Uninterruptible Power Systems (UPSs) protect your IT systems by conditioning incoming power to smooth out the sags and spikes that are all too common on the grid and other primary sources of power Providing ride-through power to cover for sags or short-term outages (30 60 minutes, typically).

Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:08:17 -0600

Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity (and experts note that there are differences) - the goals are ultimately the same: to get an organization back up and running in the event of an interruption. The problem causing the interruption could be one computer crashing or an entire network crashing. Or it could be an electrical outage or the result of a terrorist activity. The goal is to have some contingency plans in the event of a problem. A disaster recovery plan exists to preserve the organization so that it can continue to offer its services.

A disaster recovery plan is a users' guide - the documentation - for how to preserve an organization. In order for a plan to be useful, it must be created before an interruption occurs. Business continuity is disaster recovery. Lost revenue is a driving force in business continuity. The reason to do a recovery plan is essentially to keep the funding coming in and the services going, and the clients being served.

Emergency planning are those procedures and steps done immediately after an interruption to business.
Disaster recovery are the steps taken to restore some functions so that some level of services can be offered.
Business continuity is restoration planning, completing the full circle to get your organization back to where it was before an interruption.

In order to write your plan, you have to do some planning. This planning is the process that will get you to the step where you then commit your plan to paper - you cant write a plan until you do the preparation. The most difficult thing is getting started; the second most difficult task is keeping the plan current.

The Difference Between Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning Defined

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:02:20 -0600

Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is the process by which you resume business after a disruptive event. This typically means that you can get the enterprise computers, networks, and data base operational. The event might be something huge-like an earthquake or the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center-or something small, like malfunctioning software caused by a computer virus.

Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, many business executives are prone to ignoring "disaster recovery" because disaster seems an unlikely event. However Janco has found that over one third of all enterprises have had to activate their Disaster Plans in the last few years.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) suggests a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep the enterprise going and meet it business objectives. This goes beyond the enterprise computers, networks and data bases. However, the two terms are married under the acronym DR/BC or DRP/BCP. At any rate, Disaster Recovery Planning and/or Business Continuity Planning facilitate how a company will keep functioning after a disruptive event until its normal facilities are restored.

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Scope

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:33:20 -0600

Recognizing the scope of the requirements, Janco suggests that you purchase the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template and the do the following:

Conduct a business impact assessment. This involved a crossfunctional team to evaluate the business requirements and tier data based on the importance to our business operations.
Protect data and applications. It was important to back up data frequently to ensure records are kept, so we needed to upgrade
our backup equipment to a faster version to reduce the time it took to complete a backup cycle.
Review power and connectivity options. We needed to add uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) and connectivity for critical servers, network connections and selected personal computers to keep the most essential applications running in case of a power outage.
Document, test and update the disaster preparedness plan. Part of the Janco Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template plan needs you to include updated configuration diagrams of the hardware, software and network components to be used in the recovery. The plan also needed to include logistical details, such as travel to backup sites and spending authorization for emergency needs.
Consider telecommunications alternatives. Often taken for granted, telecommunications backup involving redundancy and alternatives needed to be in place - and in the case of spot outages, redundancy may be enough. For larger outages, alternative communications vehicles, including wireless phones, wireless data cards and satellite phones, had to be considered.

Testing is Critical to Disaster Recovery Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:05:26 -0600

Importance of testing is critical to the disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

All good disaster recovery and contingency plans start with having a good solid backup of data. Although systems and applications can be reinstalled and reconfigured, data cannot be rebuilt out of thin air. The key to having a good backup is to make sure the data is correct and can be successfully restored. This is not always as easy as it seems. One company had such an issue. Their backup administrator did not correctly follow procedures and when he thought he was doing a backup, he actually was not writing anything. When they tried to restore a database, they found out all the tapes were blank.

Cost of Disaster Recovery Backup Is High For Many Enterprises

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:54:53 -0600

The need for de-duplication is increasing for many organizations as they gather ever-growing volumes of data. At the same time, they are looking for ways to reduce storage costs, improve efficiencies and provide adequate disaster recovery capabilities. The key benefit is the ability to lessen the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of storage hardware by eliminating redundant blocks of data and then allowing organizations to replicate that data -- if required -- to a second system for offsite storage. That can remove the need for tape. Data de-duplication not only allows companies to reduce the disk space needed for backup and restore, but it can increase performance and reliability while reducing demands for rack space, power and cooling. Further, it can reduce the bandwidth requirements for data transfer by 90 percent or more.

Pandemic Alert Level 5 Requires DRP/BCP Plans be Activated

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:55:58 -0600

The World Health Organization has raised the pandemic alert over the spread of swine flu to phase 5.

WHO says that based on assessment of all available information and following several expert consultations raised the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to 5.

While making the annoucement, WHO stated that all countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans. At this stage, effective and essential measures include heightened surveillance, early detection and treatment of cases, and infection control in all health facilities.

Disaster Planning for a Pandemic

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:40:37 -0600

In disaster planning when a pandemic occurs the data center exists but people are in separate locations. The Disaster Planning and Business Continuity Planning processes need to make the user and business operating experience as similar as possible so that the work environment is the same in the remote site (often home) as in the office. A key requirement is to increase remote access capabilities in addition before the pandemic occurs the following planning needs to take place:

Define necessary staff levels for critical business processes
Identify who can work remotely and who has to be in the office
Validation of vaccinations for key staff members
Identify the lights out processing issues for computer operations staff
Identify the network and remote access capacity requirements - what percent of workers do you need to be on the system for the enterprise to continue to operate
Train and test of users and IT staffs in how to operate from remote locations Require key employees to work from remote site at least once a month
Validate broadband capacity to remote sites (home users)
Have copies of disaster plan available in remote site
Put in place process for the synchronization of OS system patches and VPN updates - if the workstations are not used frequently disable the auto update features for security updates but maintain a process to see that they workstations are up-to-date.
Define specific requirements for security and PCI-DSS when the disaster plan is activated for a pandemic.
Define change management and version control processes to be used and how they will be controlled during the pandemic.

How to get started with a Disaster Planning process

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:17:07 -0600

Getting started with a disaster recovery / business continuity plan may seem daunting, but is not. The process starts by addressing the needs of the business - not the IT department.

Access the enterprise's operating environment - Identify critical business functions and then determine which systems, applications and data must be available to keep each function running smoothly.
Conduct an IT business impact analysis - Develop a hierarchy of business functions and processes based on their importance to operations. You will most likely find that, although some systems need to be up and running as soon as possible after a disaster, other systems can wait.
Establish a team with enterprise wide management experience and responsibility - Gather representatives from across the business, from IT to human resources and facilities management. Each member should contribute to both the development of the disaster recovery plan and its execution. Be sure to define their responsibilities and the reporting hierarchy in the event of a disaster and to equip them with mobile technology, so they can make decisions spontaneously.
Develop budgets and funding sources - A disaster recovery plan is only as effective as the resources that are committed to it. Once you have determined what it will require to support your business recovery objectives, you need to identify the tools and procedures needed to meet them. Be specific about the cost of these mechanisms, as well as the financial risk of disaster, so you can build a realistic business case.
Define specific responsibilities and tasks - Spell out tasks, responsibilities and roles - not only to revive systems, but also to provide access to users and enable operations to continue even under compromised circumstances.
Re-evaluate what has been created and keep it up to date - Test it, reexamine it and update it regularly - once a year, twice a year or even quarterly. Also, remember that there are continuing advancements in disaster recovery technology. Keep revisiting your options to take advantage of faster, more-cost-effective solutions.

Google Designs its Servers With DRP and BCP in Mind

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:18:24 -0600

Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. But Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. Google has designed its own servers and each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. Since 2005 Google's data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity in a Mixed Vendor Environment

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:30:54 -0600

How do you create a unified Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan when you IT services are outsourced to multiple vendors and some of their facilities are in the same geographical area? Some vendors are now starting to offer services that are designed to help enterprises get a converged view with which to manage and monitor their entire IT infrastructures, regardless of whether services are delivered by in-house resources or by third-party service providers.

These service providers recognize that enterprises are moving services to specialty vendors such as security providers, network providers or computing services providers, rather than to a single services provider.

Facebook Disk Failure Results in Lost Data

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:40:41 -0600

Popular social networking site Facebook.com admitted on a blog post today that over the weekend, a hard drive failure led to the temporary loss of 10% to 15% of its users stored photographs.

According to the company, several drives failed at once during a routine upgrade Friday night.

"You may have noticed in the past day that some photos aren't appearing or are displaying a 'question mark' graphic when you go to view them. We're trying to fully understand what happened, since simultaneous hardware failures like this are rare," a Facebook engineer, stated in his blog.

Facebook said its users' photos are safe because it stores multiple copies of the data for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes, and it is working to make the photos affected by the system failure available again as soon as possible.

Portable Disk Backup Device Released

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:46:59 -0600

A hard disk drive duplicator has been released. The second generation device is a compact and portable cloning solution with blazing cloning speeds approaching 6GB/min! A full color touch screen provides an easy to use interface, and support for SATA/IDE/USB/Firewire 1394B makes the device an extremely versatile duplicator.

The hand-held unit provides the convenience of on-site as well as "on the bench" cloning. Novice users will appreciate the "wizard" function that steps them through key cloning operations. Advanced software including Clever Copy, Selective Partitions and Master Manager is included with the device. The compact, feature-rich cloning device also features support for verification of the cloned drive using an MD5 signature of target drive. The SuperSonix device is Windows Vista compatible and supports e-SATA and microSATA drives (with optional cables) as well as solid state drives.

Disaster and Business Continuity Preparedness

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:49:17 -0600

IT managers must make disaster planning a top priority if they are to prevent data loss and maintain business continuity in times of crisis. Unfortunately, day-to-day operations too often steal the time that IT professionals should otherwise devote to critical disaster planning and business continuity efforts. Enterprises cannot prepare for yesterday's disaster today. That is why you need Janco's Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template.

This comprehensive disaster and business continuity preparedness template includes:

Plan Introduction
Business Impact Analysis - including a sample impact matrix
DRP Organization Responsibilities pre and post disaster - drp checklist
Backup Strategy for Data Centers, Departmental File Servers, Wireless Network servers, Data at Outsourced Sites, Desktops (In office and "at home"), Laptops and PDA's.
Recovery Strategy including approach, escalation plan process and decision points
Disaster Recovery Procedures in a check list format
Plan Administration Process
Technical Appendix including definition of necessary phone numbers and contact points
Job Description for Disaster Recovery Manager (3 pages long) - entire disaster recovery team job descriptions are available.
Work Plan to modify and implement the template. Included is a list of deliverables for each task. (Risk Assessment and Vulnerability Assessment)

Disaster business continuity lessons learned

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:19:06 -0600

Most disasters that affect enterprises are not as great as the terrorist attack of 911 or Katrina. However, enterprises need to plan for event of that magnitude. Plans has have to take in account the loss of expertise and skills of workers killed in the disaster, businesses lost physical assets, data and the information technology to continue operating.

Preparing for disaster is nothing new. Smaller companies may not have the money to safeguard all their crucial systems. The risks they face are that 80% of companies that do have a disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place never either open their doors after the disaster or go out of business within 18 months.

Lessons that enterprises that have gone through a disaster and survived are:

There never is enough testing
The disaster and business continuity plan is not quite up to date
Not all of the backups that were taken worked
Key data was lost because the right backup was not made
Too few people know what the disaster and business continuity processes are

Do You Have Security Implemented for Your Disaster Plan

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:02:20 -0600

During the execution of your Disaster Recovery / Busniess Continuity plan is your company's information protected by the security policy and solutions you have in place now? Are you in full compliance with SOX, GLBA and HIPAA regulations, while also complying with your state's information security laws? Federal and state rules enforcing the electronic security of personal information are becoming stricter and more complicated. As a result, companies are reexamining the way they deal with sensitive information to avoid the lawsuits, fines and loss of business reputation associated with a security breach.

Still, despite business's efforts to step up their security protocols, in 2007:

More than 79 million personal electronic records containing data such as Social Security numbers and credit-card numbers were compromised in the U.S.
This was nearly four times the number reported in 2006. (Source: New State Laws Enforcing Encryption, MessageLabs Whitepaper, Nov. 2008)

Are You Prepared for a Disaster?

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:26:48 -0600

According to an AT&T Survey of 100 Chicago firms (revenues <$10M), 81 have DR plans, but only 43% have fully tested their plans within the last 12 months and 12% admitted they have never tested their business continuity plans.

Next to personnel, data is your most irreplaceable asset. Networks, application hosting platforms, and end user computing environments can be replaced quickly. However, without your customer lists, product catalogs, inventory, financial records, and other operations data your business cannot recover.

Email Failure is a Disaster

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:17:00 -0600

In today's rapidly changing business environment, Information Technology outages can be devastating. In the new Democratic administration, the email system failed for a 36 hour period. This resulted in the implementation of their primary backup system being implemented - they went back to paper.

Regardless of the cause - hurricane, fire, accident, hacker attack, or even terrorist attack - production downtime is not only costly, but in some cases causes enterprise to fail and go out of business. With a mobile workforce, global customers wanting to do business around the clock, and continually greater dependence on technology, companies need to not only protect data, but continue business operations virtually uninterrupted. The cost of downtime, depending on your industry, can be from thousands to millions of dollars per hour - due not only to disaster recovery expenses, but also to lost sales, customer defection, and lack of productivity. Add to that a damaged reputation in the marketplace and diminished shareholder confidence, and the cost of downtime can be staggering.

However, organizations that can continue business operations through any outage, large or small, can gain competitive advantage - and sometimes even take market share from competitors.

Data Needs to be Protected When a DRP is Activated

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:41:15 -0600

Information is one of a company's strategic resources. The company owns valuable proprietary processes, sensitive customer information, private vendor lists, and strategic goals that have great value - and may be attractive targets for competitors or thieves. In addition when a a disaster recovery and business continuity plan is activated, data can be inadvertently exposed and or lost.

In many instances, companies have a legal obligation to protect that data. Data also has to be protected from accidental (or intentional) corruption, and IT professionals must ensure that company data is accessible or deliverable when necessary.

As a result, companies spend a significant portion of their IT budget on managing and protecting information. Sometimes business interests collide. More security sometimes means less productivity, more cost and less return on business investment. A company's data can be lost or stolen if network users do not follow basic security procedures. Lost data can mean:

Lost time

Lost money

Lost opportunities

A lost competitive edge

A crippling legal liability and a serious public relations problem, if the company loses customer or client data

Broadband to be Expanded by the Feds

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:07:45 -0600

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning could be favorably impacted by the economic stimulus package. There are calls to invest between to $30 billion to $100 billion to expand broadband coverage within the United States.

Educause, an advocacy group focused on IT use in higher education, called for a $100 billion broadband program in a policy paper (download PDF).
The Obama transition team members are pushing for a broadband funding package that is about $30 billion.

With this additional capacity the cost structure for various disaster recovery and business continuity solutions will be significantly altered.

How Should Data Be Backup for Disaster Recovery to Be Successful

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:42:22 -0600

There are two major categories of data replication: 1) Continuous Replication, in which data changes are sent continuously between locations, and 2) Periodic Replication, in which changes are send periodically in batches. While these solutions vary in several performance and operational parameters, the key differences are in what kind of recovery they offer.

Continuous replication offers a single recovery point. Write operations are continuously copied to the remote location, the copy is identical to the current production data. In a physical disaster you lose very little data because the remote copy is current. However, with a virus, corruption, accidental deletion, or malfunction, the corruption is propagated to the remote location immediately. No previous restore point is available, leaving you to recover from backup tapes. This can take days or even weeks, and may result in significant amounts of data loss.
Periodic replication is built on the premise that point-in-time copies, or snapshots, are created and sent regularly - but not continuously - to the remote location. Production performance is not impacted, and distance between sites is unlimited. This method offers multiple recovery points and a catalog from which to choose them. Because there is distance between the production and replication sites, you have protected data on disk that is quickly accessible in case of physical disaster. In addition, should a virus, corruption, accidental deletion, or malfunction occur, you can restore "known good" data from a point in time prior to the disaster. Application recovery is fast, because snapshots provide application data in a clean state.

Backup and Recovery Policy is Requried for an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:35:52 -0600

Backup and recovery policy is required a first step in and Information Technology disaster plan. In addition the disaster recovery policy must be reviewed at least annually to assure its relevance. Just as in the development of such a policy, a planning team that consists of upper management, and personnel from information security, information technology, human resources, or other operations should be assembled to review the disaster policy. Roles and responsibilities of the planning team should be as follows:

Perform an initial risk assessment to determine current information systems vulnerabilities.
Perform an initial business impact analysis to document and understand the interdependencies among business processes and determine how the business would be affected by an information systems outage.
Take an inventory of information systems assets such as computer hardware, software, applications, and data.
Identify single points of failure within the information systems infrastructure.
Identify critical applications, systems, and data.
Prioritize key business functions.

Creating a Disaster Plan For Your Remote Offices

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:01:43 -0600

When remote offices are operational then Disaster Planning and Contingency Planning need to take them into consideration. The Janco Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan Template has specific section dedicated to this. It includes everything needed:

Work Plan - The first step is to select the group of people who will form your disaster recovery / contingency planning committee. Include high-level managers, consider representatives from all the departments within your business, and, if possible, include a human resources representative as well.
Current contact list with multiple methods of contact - Not only should you keep a list of the names of all employees, but that contact list should include alternate ways that people can communicate with each other. Include home phone numbers, pager numbers, non-work e-mail addresses, and cell phone numbers. Create a formal phone tree that can be activated should you need to get in touch with your employees quickly.
Organizational Succession Plan - What if several members of your management team were in an accident and couldn' t perform their regular responsibilities? What if key members of your company simply couldn' t be contacted for a period of time when you need to make some critical decisions? To prepare for this kind of circumstance, you need to consider a clear chain of command and authority. If key personnel are missing, who' s in charge? Who makes decisions?
DRP/BCP Organizational Chart - Have a single decision-maker. That person needs to know the steps to take in a crisis, and how to reach all employees and other essential contacts (clients, customers, etc). And employees need to know who to take direction from in the chaos that frequently follows a disaster.
Physical work space alternatives - If something happened to your offices, what would you do? Can employees work out of their homes? Is there another company that would share their facilities with you temporarily until you can rent or buy space at a new location?
Risks and vulnerabilities - Make a checklist. Do you live in tornado alley? Put tornado damage on that list. Do you work in an office with no alarm system? Put building security on the list. Might layoffs occur sometime in the future? Add workplace violence. What if the phones get disconnected? What if your key supplier can' t get shipments to you?
Backup your data - Most people have thought about backing up their computer data. Where are your important papers and files - both print and electronic? If your office computers or servers are destroyed, you' d better have your data recently backed up off site.

Backup Strategies for Disaster Recovery Plans

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:47:09 -0600

Here is a set of common disaster recovery techniques for backup and data recovery:

Bulk copy with CIFS, NFS and FTP - For many scenarios, backup and recovery is no more complicated than scripted file copies. However, these protocols are notorious under-performers when it comes to WANs even on Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed MPLS links. If they are even copied at all; the combination of byte caching and object caching means that only the changed parts of files need cross the wire. For most bulk transfers a 10x increase in performance is common.
Differential Backup applications - These applications keep track of file changes and only pass changes between locations. However, they, too, can be dramatically compressed using byte caching technology and are subject to the same bandwidth contention issues of any other application if a traffic control solution like MACH5 is not in place. Although some use proprietary protocols for transmission, those that use the underlying operating system benefit from protocol optimization. For most backup applications, a 3x performance increase is common.
Database Replication using native SQL replication - Oracle replication and Microsoft DTS use complex SQL statements to automate data transfer. Byte caching and compression removes the inherent redundancy of this data, while user-aware bandwidth management can separate database use from database backup and allocate bandwidth accordingly. For most SQL automated transfers, a 3x performance increase is common.
Database Replication using log shipping - Once the database files are dropped to flat files, they are usually transported as part of a bulk copy. These files are highly redundant, and byte caching and compression can improve their transfer dramatically. Further enhancements from optimizing the underlying transport protocols help as well. For log shipping, a 10x performance increase is common.
Data Replication using web services as part of a Service Oriented Architecture - As SOA gains popularity, transporting data from different parts of the organization as XML over HTTP and HTTPS will become more common. Use internal and external SSL encrypted Web services.

Budgeting Critical for Disaster and Business Continuity Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:40:54 -0600

Once the risk assessment (see Threat Vulnerability Assessment - Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Tool - http://www.e-janco.com/threat.htm) is complete determine what can be done to minimize the risk and what the cost to do that will be. How does a company minimize its

exposure to the threat? How does the company minimize the impact disaster event to the business? For example, our small distribution company could employ an emergency power supply to mitigate its power outage threat and have all its data backed (see Backup and Backup Retention Policy - http://www.e-janco.com/backuppolicy.html), which are stored at a remote site when the hurricane occurs. The more preventative measures you establish upfront the better. Janco Associates say, "Money spent in preparation and testing are worth more than dollars spent in recovery."

The results of risk assessment should be a comprehensive list of possible threats, each with its corresponding solution and cost. The disaster and business continuity planner must present all of these threats to the business operations management, so they can make informed decisions regarding the disaster recovery budget. The disaster and business continuity planner needs to communicate the risks the business faces from disasters. Business operations can fail to budget funds but they must do so knowing what risk they face and accept in doing so.

A good place to begin is by presenting the cost of downtime to the business. How long can your business afford to be without its computer systems should one of your threats occur?

Ultimately, the business operations unit decides which threats the business can tolerate. When developing a DRP (see Disaster Recovery Plan Template Business Continuity - http://www.e-janco.com/DisasterPlanning.htm), disaster and business continuity planners are shooting in the dark without those business indications. Both the disaster and business continuity planner and the business units must agree on which data and applications are most critical to the business and need to be recovered most quickly in a disaster. The management of our small distribution company, for example, may decide they can budget only for the emergency generators and the company will have to assume the risk of an minor hurricane.

Disaster recovery budgets vary from company to company but they typically run between 3% to 15% percent of the overall IT budget. Companies for which system availability is crucial usually are on the higher end of the scale, while companies that can function without it are on the lower end. However, these percentages may be too small.

Network Communication Plan Is Part of the Disaster Plan

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:17:18 -0600

A complete disaster recovery plan needs to include a way to implement an emergency communications network. It needs to be able to be rapidly deployed when a disaster takes place. Such a plan must take into account worst case possibilities regarding the disaster affected area without making any assumptions as to what infrastructure the affected area could provide. The entire network must therefore work independent of the existing networking present at the site, if any.

It should include:

Adequate communication coverage of the affected area.
Mobile communication devices and terminals for disaster recovery personnel with voice and data capabilities.
Group voice communications among on-site personnel with push-to-talk support for voice.
Voice and data communications between disaster recovery personel at a remote location as well as with a 'disaster-management command center'.
Internet service to provide information exchange with the outside world.
A satellite uplink for the network's entire external traffic.

Formal Tested Backup Procedures Critical to Disaster Recovery

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:53:58 -0600

A site-wide disaster can happen at any location, any time. That's way offsite protection is an indispensable aspect of any comprehensive data protection strategy. By employing remote site replication, the organization automatically reaps the benefits of an off-site data protection strategy for each of those remote locations, since the data is replicated from each of those geographically dispersed remote sites to the central office.

Once the data arrives at the central location, the backup and restore policies employed must include an offsite protection strategy for that location. Whether employing direct disk-to tape, disk-to-disk-to-tape, or other methodology, the organization's data cannot be considered truly protected until it is secured at an offsite location.

Elements of an Effective Disaster Prevention System

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:38:00 -0600

Disaster Prevention Systems, based upon 'intelligent' devices dedicated to the task of protecting computer systems from environmental hazards, can aid personnel in the early detection of problems, and enable the automation of protective procedures when persons are unable to respond effectively.

As a first step in responding to an irregular condition, the selected technology should attempt to notify both the people who depend upon the continuance of computing services for the performance of their duties, and those people who may be expected to be capable of dealing with the detected problem. It should maintain a history log, for future reference, of sensed conditions and actions taken. The roster of people to notify should include:

System Users
Site Managers
Security Personnel
Maintenance Personnel
Service Bureaus and Alarm Co. Central Offices
Authorities at Remote Sites

Enterprises Are More Sensitive to Outages

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:34:07 -0600

For most enterprises any downtime means lost productivity, lost revenue, lost customers and lost opportunities. The reasons that this is the case are:

eCommerce Online shopping and the customers experience and downtime is not acceptable.
Retail The critical applications that track point-of-sales data and enable inventory and distribution require applications that are always available.
Health Care With the digitization of medical images and patient records, retaining and ensuring availability of these applications and files is beyond mission-critical. In addition many operating rooms depend on computer technology, service levels can actually be measured in the number of lives.
Manufacturing Competitive pressures drive companies to run as efficiently as possible. Just-in-time manufacturing processes that coordinate shipments from suppliers around the world demand 24 x 7 availability.
Globalization Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on a global economy. Many have established key technology in follow-the-sun modes that require 24 x 7 availability.
Outage visibility Business continuity is now a boardroom-level concern. In many cases, it is the CEO who mandates that the business be fully protected. Even worse than an outage itself is the fallout from negative press, loss of customer confidence and, for public companies, potential impact to stock prices.

WiFi on Airlines Could Help Disaster Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:49:55 -0600

(Reuters) - Delta Air Lines Inc will soon start rolling out broadband Wi-Fi access for its entire domestic mainline fleet of more than 330 planes, the U.S. carrier said on Tuesday.

The access will cost $9.95 on flights of three hours or less and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours.

"Beginning this fall, our passengers will have the ability to stay connected when they travel with us throughout the continental United States," said Richard Anderson, Delta's chief executive officer.

Delta expects Wi-Fi to be available on all its domestic mainline planes by the summer of 2009.

Recovery management—what is it and why is it important?

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:17:31 -0600

Recovery management defined - Recovery management is a new, strategic approach to data protection that focuses on fast, reliable recovery as the aggregate goal of all protection activities. It combines backup, replication, continuous data protection (CDP), analytics and reporting, and management services in a integrated solution that delivers higher levels of recovery than any single technology, no matter how robust. Recovery management relies heavily on information lifecycle management (ILM) principles to map protection and recovery services to the point-in-time business value of an application or information.

In todays network environment, as many as 60 percent of backups simply do not complete successfully. That means a lot of time and resources are expended while troubleshooting backup problems. And many organizations never test their backup data or recovery procedures. Can data be recovered? How long will it take? Will the recovered data be usable? Often, nobody seems to know. Even when backup technology works as intended, it often does not scale well or adapt to change in business requirements and network infrastructure. Nor does it deliver the timely, meaningful reporting that is necessary to develop efficient data-growth and related recovery strategies.

A backup-centric protection model just is not nimble or flexible enough to deal with the growing complexity of doing business in an always-on, digital world. By contrast, a recovery-centric protection model takes a broader, more holistic view of protection that is independent of specific functional technologies. It is a different way of thinking about protection that delivers measurable benefits.

Can Every Disaster Be Planned For?

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:09:42 -0600

The world may be too complex for organizations to protect against every disaster contingency, but with the right technologies, clear service-level expectations, practical recovery policies enterprises can minimize the business consequences when the unexpected happens.

Flowing directly out of contingency policies, the contingency plan details the roles and responsibilities of departments and individuals in keeping technology systems available, as well as the procedures for restoring IT systems during an emergency. Other key elements of contingency planning include resource requirements, training needs, the frequency of training exercises and testing, maintenance schedules, and data-backup schedules.

The phases of a contingency plan include the initial notification and activation when the emergency strikes, restoration and recovery once emergency teams have been mobilized, and finally a return to normal operation - or available to help organizations develop and maintain accurate inventories of IT resources. Vendors offer modules that use software agents to scour the IT infrastructure, storing details about hardware and software assets and their configuration parameters in configuration management databases.

Disaster Planning in a Recessions - Risks Faced

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:15:35 -0600

IT departments face flat budgets and, at the same time, find that their organizations have become increasingly dependent on uninterrupted access to business-critical data.

In today's world, prudent IT administrators prepare to recover from two types of disasters as part of a complete Business Continuity and Availability (BC and A) plan. The first is a localized disaster, affecting a building or a small set of buildings. The second is a wide-area disaster, such as a hurricane or a regional power outage. Enterprises must replicate data to alternate data centers, located at a variety of distances from the primary data center, while maintaining acceptable data currency standards.

This Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) can be used as a Disaster Planning template for any enterprise. The Disaster Recovery template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant. The Disaster Planning Template comes as both a Word and static fully indexed PDF document and includes:

Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Template
Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Work Plan
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program

Preparation for Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity in light of SOX has two primary parts. The first is putting systems in place to completely protect all financial and other data required to meet the reporting regulations and to archive the data to meet future requests for clarification of those reports. The second is to clearly and expressly document all these procedures so that in the event of a SOX audit, the auditors clearly see that the DR plan exists and will appropriately protect the data.

Disaster Planning Tips to Keep You Doors Open

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:40:45 -0600

What are the some quick tip for the disaster planning processes:

Ensure that your recovery plan is not attached to any one person.
Keep your plan portable, and keep it away from you
Make arrangements in advance with software vendors for license keys to put backup software at the disaster recovery site in operation.
Contact phone lists should also include vendors.
Remember the little things, like mice -- companies that develop disaster recovery sites may have all the servers they need, but they sometimes overlook essential hardware peripherals.

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.

After You Recover from a Disaster You Must Handle the Media

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:54:14 -0600

After companies recover from a disaster, they need to manage their images. Planet.com, an Internet Services provider, did not do that after a major fire. Nothing was posted on their site. The only news was on a media site (IDG - Computerworld). The story is

(Computerword) - The Planet.com Internet Services Inc. hopes to have all 9,000 of its servers in its Houston data center back online later tonight following a blast that shut down the facility on Saturday afternoon.

When firefighters arrived at around 5 p.m., they could see "light smoke" at the Planet data center -- the aftermath of an explosion in a network gear room that produced enough force to move walls. Sprinklers quickly doused whatever flames erupted; the fire was attributed to an electrical problem with a transformer, according to a Houston Fire Department spokeswoman. There were no injuries.

Although the data center says it has power systems that "are designed to run uninterrupted" and a "fully redundant network operations center" with diesel generators, the electrical problem exposed an apparent Achilles' heel in its business continuity planning. Firefighters told data center workers to turn off all the power, according Planet spokeswoman Yvonne Donaldson. That meant the servers, even though they weren't damaged, were offline.

Approximately 6,000 of the affected servers were returned to service early this morning. Another 3,000 were due to return online by tonight, the company said. The Planet staff provided updates on the restoration on its customer forum site, including a message from CEO and Chairman Douglas Erwin, who wrote that some servers will be relying on generator power for a week until normal utility connections are restored.

The Planet operates more than 40,000 servers at multiple data centers and hosts more than 3 million Web sites.

While Planet data center staff worked to restore service, users -- many of them small business owners -- wrote of their frustrations over the outage on forum posts. Questions about the data center's backup capabilities were raised, as well. One person, flynnibus, wrote: "You shouldn't put all your money into one bank -- and you shouldn't put all your servers in one DC [data center] if you want to be truly resilient."

Many Disasters are Magnified by Human Error

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:54:38 -0600

(Computerworld) A disk failure in a Sun Microsystems Inc. server caused the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM database to crash for nearly 20 hours last week, according to the FAA.

The NOTAM (notice to airmen) system provides notices to airmen, or pilots, regarding airports, equipment and security issues. The system went down late May 22 and was back up at around 7 p.m. on May 23.

Because of the disk failure, information had to be delivered to pilots through local air traffic controllers and alternate systems, including a Web site set up to disseminate the most up-to-date information, said a manager of aeronautical information management for the FAA. However, flight safety was never a problem, the FAA said.

"What happened was the drive in an end-of-life Sun box failed in the middle of updating the information on the hard drive, so it screwed up the database," the FAA said.

That was the beginning of the complications. The FAA team replaced the hardware and the drive which got the system running again.

The FAA already had the equipment to replace in place, they just had not done it yet, and that is why the hardware recovery was quite simple according to the FAA.

But even then, the system was running slowly, or in a deteriorated mode, and it got so bad that his team decided to reopen the problem to see what was going on.

As the technicians were working to fix the database, they decided to go to the backup system. As they did that, they soon realized they had written the error over to the backup system and had corrupted that system as well.

Role of IT in a Disaster Defined

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:50:34 -0600

The first steps the IT department should take depend on how seriously a disaster affects resources. Does it require a few desktops and a room off site to provide a temporary recovery solution? Or does a larger plan need to be activated to move PCs and servers to a "hot site" to restore entire applications and set up temporary work facilities for a limited number of key workers to operate until normalcy is restored?

But what good does it do for IT to restore applications and data if there is no one there to run things? It is only half the solution, albeit the first half. The second half is the contact information for the business continuity piece. Recovering from disaster is less a solution than a process. Governments must take control of their own destinies. In the event of a disaster, a core team of people across all departments is typically designated to continue business operations pending the restoration of a normal work environment. These people need accurate information with which to call on IT and on vendors for technical support or to report to work at a temporary site.

What Drives Disaster Recovery?

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:49:46 -0600

(Computerworld) As more organizations adopt replication as a primary component of disaster recovery, it's important to better understand some of the variances among replication technology and to clearly set expectations with application owners when planning replication deployments.

A common area of confusion in dealing with replication is the distinction between consistency and synchronicity. Many newcomers to replication tend to focus on synchronization issues when, from a recovery perspective, consistency may be the true requirement from an application perspective.

So what is the difference and why is it important? Synchronization implies complete and continuous fidelity between local and replicated data stores. With true synchronous replication, a write operation is not acknowledged until it has been written to the local storage system and replicated to the remote storage system. This certainly provides a very high degree of consistency, but it also carries with it high costs and significant limitations regarding distance and latency that can impact application performance.

Synchronous replication is found primarily in the domain of the top tier of enterprise storage offerings and is usually reserved for those applications that are characterized by very high transaction rates where the recovery and re-execution of lost transactions would be difficult and costly.

The majority of replication is therefore of the asynchronous variety -- meaning that there is some degree of variance, based on change rate and available bandwidth, between the local and the replicated targets. In other words, by definition, the source and target are inconsistent with one another.

However, consistency still plays a critical role in the recoverability of asynchronously replicated data. The key is in understanding the interdependencies among related data components of a particular business function and ensuring that they are consistent among themselves at any given point in time at the target location. They may lag behind the original, but as long as they are equally behind, the function or application should be recoverable.

Although the notion of consistency groups is well established among enterprise-class storage systems, it may be less so for other forms of replication. Understanding consistency requirements and the ability of replication technologies to meet them should be a high priority consideration in disaster recovery design.

Change Control Needs to be Implemented for DRP and BCP to Work

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:11:04 -0600

Analysts confirm that approximately 80% of all software released into production will fail; and 70-80% of the cost of ownership of such business applications is related to finding and fixing these errors. In order to increase productivity and promote cost savings, it is imperative to consider the source of these failures, as well as the nature of the production environments

Add to that the processes necessary to support a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan and enterprises have an ever increasing complex problem.

Disk from space shuttle crash recovered

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:53:25 -0600

(Computerworld) Researchers who extracted data from a hard drive onboard the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia say the device was so thoroughly damaged in the shuttles fiery crash that it just looked like a cracked "hunk of metal" when it appeared at their door six months later.

Data recovery specialists at Kroll Ontrack Inc. painstakingly retrieved 99% of the information stored on the charred 400MB Seagate hard drive's 2.5-in. platters over a two day period after the device was discovered six months after the 2003 shuttle crash. The device was found in a dried up lake bed along the shuttle's debris area.

The successful retrieval of the data was disclosed in the April, 2008, issue of the Physical Review E journal, which published data from tests performed by the shuttle astronauts on the critical viscosity of xenon gas, according to published reports. The results of the tests were stored on the disk and retrieved by Kroll.

The Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere of Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members and scattering debris across Texas and Louisiana.

The Importance of a Business Resumption and Continuity Plan is Key to Disaster Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:40:19 -0600

Disaster recovery has always been a key concern in virtually all companies. But the widespread damage from Hurricane Katrina has companies re-evaluating their planning, procedures and overall systems to make sure they can survive a major outage.

Wherever data resides, it must be protected. With this idea as the driving force, companies are looking for new and easier-to-manage ways to safeguard company databases, records and files.

When a disaster does strike (be it a fire, a flooded data center or a catastrophic malware attack) companies need to take several steps to reduce downtime and get operations back to normal.

A business resumption and continuity plan should be in place before any disaster occurs.

Mac Back-up released

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:24:15 -0600

Berkeley Data Systems released Mac Mozy public beta, the first unlimited online backup service for Mac users worldwide. The service allows Mac users to encrypt and automatically back up all of their digital media content online, including collections from iTunes and iPhoto.

Designed as a consumer service, Mac Mozy leverages Apples innovative Spotlight Search technology, allowing users to easily select the types of files they want to back up. The service installs quickly and runs quietly in the background. Backup speeds vary from user to user, largely determined by the upload speed of the consumers internet connection.

Mac Mozy offers an added measure of privacy by allowing its users to choose between a Mozy encryption key and a private encryption key. Incremental backups and block level differentials are included, which means subsequent backups complete at a much faster rate than the initial backup. Mozys servers also retain the most recent version of a file as well as 30 days worth of previously modified file versions. Customers may retrieve files or versions of the files via the internet or by requesting a DVD restore with next-day delivery.

Risk Taken by Not Shipping Backup Tapes Off-Site

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:48:48 -0600

(Computerworld) University of Miami officials last week acknowledged that six backup tapes from its medical school that contained more than 2 million medical records was stolen in March from a van that was transporting the data to an off-site facility.

The vice president of communications at the university said a vehicle used by Archive America Ltd. to transport the patient data was broken into in downtown Coral Gables, Fla. Thieves removed a transport case carrying the schools computer backup tapes.

For reasons the VP could not explain, Archive America waited 48 hours before finally notifying the university about the break-in and theft. Officials from the transport firm could not be reached.

The university posted an alert about the incident a full month after the backup tapes were stolen. In a statement, the senior vice president for medical affairs and dean of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said, Even though they were confident that the patients data was safe, we felt that it was in the best interest of the physician-patient relationship that the incident should be transparent.

Since the incident, the senior VP said that the university temporarily stopped transporting backup data off-site. At this point, the University is not transporting anything until they conduct their own internal evaluation of the incident and see if there is anything that could have been done differently or better.

How Do Mobile Workers Get Protected in a Disaster

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:03:57 -0600

From mobile workers perspectives, up-to-the-minute information is the life blood of their jobs. Regardless of whether they are in a home office or on the other side of the globe, speed and dependability are the keys to successfully doing their jobs. From an IT departments perspective, they must support the needs of all employees, while diligently maintaining security policies, which is becoming increasingly challenging now that the majority of the workforce has stepped beyond the corporate walls. Can these two opposing forces be reconciled? Can remote access be both fast and secure from any location?

Data at rest is growing much faster than network throughput. That makes it difficult to get backups completed on time and on budget not to mention trying to recover from an IT emergency.

The first is to accomplish backups in a timely yet accurate manner. Given organic data growth, and that each logical data object has between four and eight copies somewhere in the network, even differential backups can be tough to fit into assigned windows. Synchronous or live-to-live data models are even more bandwidth intensive and latency intolerant.

The second challenge is minimizing downtime. In the event of a failure or disaster, how quickly can backed-up data be restored? Considering a differential backup can take 8 hours or more to complete, and only represents 10-20 percent of the total data set, a full restore can be daunting. According to Ziff Davis Research, the average organization has 94TB of managed storage, and getting that data across the network only begins after the systems have been physically restored.

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.

The Magic of Creating a Disaster Plan - Data and Backup

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:13:41 -0600

There is some magic that happens when you follow some basic steps in creating a functioning Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan. You should start with:

An objective to get back to a fully functioning data center and business
Know what data is necessary and what is nice to have
Validate that you have the data you will need
Assume that anything critical will fail
Focus on quick solutions that will minimize outages
Have sufficient resources available before you start
Encrypt data but know how to get at it in an emergency
Focus on Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with a Recovery Point Ojectivie (RPO)

During a recovery process what are the signs your staff is under stress

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:53:57 -0600

During a disater recovery processyou will need all hands on deck. In addition to a entire range of other personnel and resource issues, you will need to know how your team is doing and is stress of the situation you are in causing things to go badly.

Some of the things that you should look for are:

Team members feeling close to tears much of the time
Team members finding it hard to concentrate and make decisions
Team members being short tempered with people at home and at work
Team members feeling tired most of the time and or sleeping badly
Team members feeling stretched beyond their limits at the end of the day
Team members drinking and smoking more to help them get through the day
Team members feeling that they just can not cope
Team members eating when they are not hungry
Team members feeling that they have achieved nothing at the end of the day

We have a Disaster Recovery Plan - But Will it Work?

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:31:44 -0600

We have got a plan! - Many a CIO has come to rue making such a blanket statement to a CEO regarding the companys disaster preparedness. A decade of regional calamities has shown that traditional approaches to disaster planning have failed to keep organizations operational. IT-focused recovery plans can leave the overall organization in the lurch because they often do not address such business issues as handling a disaster that is regional in nature; employee availability; communications; travel and transportation; and data location and availability. But an integrated business continuity and resilience plan can take some of the pressure off CIOs by reducing the business impacts of a disruptive event, speeding recovery times and delivering value to the organizationeven if a disaster never strikes.

Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:13:08 -0600

Enterprises rely on business critical information; this makes it imperative for IT departments to protect against unexpected data loss from disasters. Both replication and backup involve large amounts of information transferred globally but limitations in the WAN can make it difficult to execute the plan effectively. A preventative plan in place should always include WAN acceleration to facilitate disaster recovery.

Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:16:22 -0600

The term Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are often used interchangeably. They are in fact, different but complementary components of a business's overall recovery and continuity planning. Whereas Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is concerned with the recovery of systems and infrastructure components, Business Continuity Planning has a larger scope - namely, the determination of which business components and functions need to be recovered - and those which can be ignored. This paper explores several of the key components of a business continuity planning effort. It also provides a high level framework for the creation, implementation, and maintenance of a Business Continuity Plan.

Whaling Security Attacks Have Can Put Your Disaster Recovery Plan at Risk

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:49:42 -0600

For the last couple of years, security researchers have been sounding warnings that phishers could turn their attention to super-personalized attacks targeted at high-level corporate employees whaling attacks. Now, however, there is growing evidence that this type of attack is moving from theory to practice. The reasons? The bad guys are getting better access to the information they need to bait these e-mails--both because they are getting better at mining databases on compromised corporate sites, and because employees are providing more useful information at networking sites such as LinkedIn and MySpace.

Once launched, the results of a whaling attack can be devastating. They are hitting the high-level executives and getting access to these individuals entire workstations.

Like all spearphishing or targeted phishing attacks, whaling involves personal information, but in this case the targets are high-level, high-value individuals whose credentials, if compromised, can endanger an entire organization. The targets are carefully chosen, and the number of e-mails distributed is small. Where a massive phishing attack might involve billions of e-mails sent from botnets with a million zombies, whaling usually involves anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand e-mails, which are sent from a botnet with perhaps 20,000 compromised computers. Conventional methods for identifying phishing attacks depend on spotting a lot of identical messages, so the small scale of whaling attacks makes them essentially invisible to Internet scanners.

SSD - Solid State Drives are a great Disaster Planning Solution

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:20:29 -0600

EMC may have been first out of the gate with an enterprise-class solid-state drive (SSD), but it looks like the rest of the pack is ready to join the field. There's a new round of start-ups and joint ventures aimed at developing flash and SSD technology expressly for high-end enterprise environments as opposed to traditional laptop and mobile device markets. The newest player on the scene is Pliant Technology, led by Maxtor and Quantum co-founder Jim McCoy. The company is making the rounds of leading venture capitalists with plans for a new controller mechanism that will boost flash performance up to RAM-quality, with possible demo models out by the end of the year. Even closer to launch is the SSD PRO 7000 system from Imation, jointly developed with controller technology from Mtron Co. The system is due out in the first quarter and boasts a maximum read speed of 120 MBps, with a write speed of 90 MBps and 0.1 ms random access. According to industry observers, demand for SSDs among enterprise users is white hot.

Downtime Costs are High

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:44:35 -0600

ESG has found that there is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, research indicates that 36% of enterprises will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. Virtually any amount of downtime can mean lost productivity, lost revenue, lost customers and lost opportunities -- not to mention damage to brand. This is why you need a strong disaster proof solution.

Janco finds over one third of enterprises will lose significant revenue with one hour outage

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:00:23 -0600

Janco Associates, Inc. (http://www.e-janco.com) has found that there is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, Janco research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications. Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. In the past, this type of business demand was only consigned to a relatively small group. However, many more organizations of all sizes, in all industries and located across the globe, now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster.

Under Sea Cables Cut - Internet Service at Risk

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:31:24 -0600

(BBC) A submarine cable in the Middle East has been snapped, adding to global net problems caused by breaks in two lines under the Mediterranean on Wednesday.

The Falcon cable, owned by a firm which operates another damaged cable, led to a critical telecom breakdown, according to one local official.

The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom. The earlier break disrupted service in Egypt, the Middle East and India.

The situation is critical for us in terms of congestion, chief executive of Dubai's ISP DU, told The Associated Press, following the most recent break.

Wednesdays incident caused disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.

Flag Telecom said a repair ship was expected to arrive at the site of the first break - 8.3km from Alexandria in Egypt - on 5 February, with repair work expected to take a week.

A repair ship deployed to the second break - 56km from Dubai - was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the firm said.

Web returns

The first cable - the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) - was cut at 0800 on 30 January, the firm said.

INSIDE A SUBMARINE CABLE

1 Polyethylene cover
2,4 Stranded steel armour wires
3,5 Tar-soaked nylon yarn
6 Polycarbonate insulator
7 Copper sheath
8 Protective core
9 Optical fibres
Not to scale

A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.

FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.

SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.

The firm said the cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the stretch of network between India and Europe by 75% percent.

As a result, carriers in Egypt and the Middle East re-routed their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The cause of the break has still not been confirmed. Initial reports suggested that it could have been snapped by a ship's anchor.

But Egypts communications ministry said damage to the cables in the Mediterranean was not caused by ships.

The transport ministry said that footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

The ministrys maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area, a statement said.

Internet service providers said they expected India's to be back to about 80% of its usual speed by the end of Friday.

In Egypt Minister of Communications and Information Technology .said he expected to be at the same capacity within two days.

However, it is not before ten days until the internet service returns to its normal performance.

The Cost of Business Continuity

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:57:22 -0600

Research clearly demonstrates that a good business continuity plan is by no stretch reserved for organizations with huge budgets. When you consider how many organizations actually use their BC plan, and that any company without one could be just a day or two from a "fatal issue," the real costs for business continuity assurance begin to look miniscule. We were encouraged to find that not only did 73 percent of organizations have formalized BC plans in place, but also that 87 percent of those plans include a remote disaster recovery site as a failover option. Clearly, real-time protection of data is a priority.

We also found that organizations are prioritizing the protection of customer-centric IT services in their plans to assure BC. Survey respondents ranked customer support as the top service to protect, with e-mail and phone systems also ranking among the top four. A lot of people might have guessed that the primary focus among IT services companies would be order processing or the like, the assumption being that the only thing businesses really care about is the cash register. But our survey results show that this is not the case at all; the talk about focusing on the customer is in fact being carried out as part of operational planning. IT leaders are obviously demonstrating alignment with the business goal of customer-centricity.

Uptime the key issue that drives Disaster Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:53:36 -0600

There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications.

Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. More and more organizations of all sizes now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.

In fact, in the enterprise space 14% of the businesses polled said they cannot tolerate any application downtime. More than 58% cannot tolerate four hours or less of application downtime. All told, more than 80% of Enterprise-class and mid-tier respondents reported that they cannot tolerate more than 24 hours of application unavailability2. What is even more interesting is that survey respondents were not just from the Financial Sector but also included Government, Manufacturing, Retail and Health Care (including Pharmaceutical). Some of the reasons for these survey results include the following:

Retail: The critical applications that track point-of-sales data and enable inventory and distribution require applications that are always available. Being able to react quickly to changing conditions can mean the difference between profitability and loss. Online shopping and the customers experience are also very important to retailers

, and downtime is not acceptable.
Health Care: With the digitization of medical images and patient records, retaining and ensuring availability of these applications and files is beyond mission-critical. Especially when you consider the pervasive use of technology in the operating room, effectiveness can actually be measured in the number of lives, not just dollars, saved.
Manufacturing: Competitive pressures drive companies to run as efficiently as possible. Just-in-time manufacturing processes that coordinate shipments from suppliers around the world demand 24 x 7 availability.
Globalization: Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on a global economy. Many have established key technology in follow-the-sun modes that require 24 x 7 availability.
Increased sensitivity to outages: Business continuity is now a boardroom-level concern. In many cases, it is the CEO who mandates that the business be fully protected. Even worse than an outage itself is the fallout from negative press, loss of customer confidence and, for public companies, potential impact to stock prices.

Regardless of the industry, the trend is clear: more businesses require highly available solutions. Not only is this expanding along industry lines, but we also see mid-tier companies requiring disaster tolerant solutions.

Firmware - one more issue to address in your disaster plan

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:53:08 -0600

Storage system firmware updates are available as major and minor releases. Companies like EMC Corp. typically provide a major release for its Clariion storage systems about once a year while minor releases come out about once a quarter. Major releases include significant enhancements to storage system features while minor releases provide bug fixes for any issues in the major release. The problems that surface should a company fall behind in its firmware upgrades are increased operational risks as well as delays if fixes are needed.

The need to keep firmware current stems from interoperability problems that emerge when companies change their Fibre Channel SANs. New operating systems, operating system and database upgrades and new Fibre Channel SAN devices constantly introduce new capabilities and features into the SAN. Though storage system vendors typically test for these new features in these products before they are publicly released, companies may need to apply a patch to use them.

Being down two or three major releases also gets problematic. While vendors almost always support older major releases, new patches are based on the last major release. If running an older release, a company may need to wait while a special patch is prepared for them.

Planning firmware upgrades is an easy-to-overlook component of system maintenance. But with many companies in lock-down at this time of year and administrators likely having some free time, December is a good time to plan for and then take the necessary steps to perform a firmware upgrade.

FCC Requires Backup Power For Cell Sites

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:33:46 -0600

Christmas came a bit early this year for manufacturers of backup power sources. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has released rules mandating that mobile providers and local exchange carriers install backup power for cell sites and remote telecom facilities. The rules are a direct response to the communications meltdown after Hurricane Katrina. More recently, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis demonstrated how fragile (and still inadequate) the system is. A lesser publicized goal of the 700 MHz auction set for next month is to create a national broadband emergency network. The rules will also require companies to file a plan in six months about how they will meet the new demands.

Erasing Files A Must For a Secure Environment

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:38:09 -0600

When you delete a file from your hard disk, it may seem as if it is gone forever In truth, however, this is not the case. You must wipe it clear "serveral" times or someone can find traces of the data that was there orginally.

The reason why file deletion is not as thorough as it can be is a simple one; resource management. Actually overwriting every bit of every file that is to be deleted will use more resources than would be practical, for everyday use. And in fact, this simple file deletion is usually sufficient for the basic users needs.

The seemingly permanent process of file deletion actually leaves the file data still on the hard disk. When a file is deleted, it is simply marked deleted, and the space that it occupies on the disk is accordingly marked ready for use. Hence, it may be overwritten when more disk space is required, but this is by no means certain, unless the entire hard disk is filled with data.

Now, the actual data that make up the file is still on the hard disk, even after deletion. This makes it available for recovery, usually done using specially designed data recovery programs. MSDOS, in fact, has a built-in UNDELETE command which may recover recently deleted files.

However, secur

ity considerations might necessitate the complete erasure of a given hard disk or collection of hard disks. When reassigning hard disks, for instance, or switching computers around, confidential data might need to be deleted. To lessen the possibility that this data is recovered, a hard disk wipe may be performed.

When a hard disk wipe is performed, the entire area of the hard disk is actually overwritten with random data. This means that the data that used to be on the hard disk becomes much harder (practically impossible) to recover after such a process. Almost no traces of the previous data that used to be on the disk is left, making a hard disk wipe a secure improvement upon ordinary file deletion.

The metadata or information on the data that used to be on the hard disk is also wiped clean, since the entire space of the hard disk is overwritten. The randomness of this data used to overwrite depends on the algorithm used to generate it. Some hard disk wipe programs give users the choice to select the algorithm they want the program to use. However this is not as necessary for hard disk wipe programs as it is for file shredder programs, which wipe individual files. This is because when it is the entire hard disk that is wiped, the degree of randomness of the overwriting data is not anymore as important.

Performing a hard disk wipe is often as easy as clicking a few buttons in a specially designed hard disk wipe program. Some programs are set to run automatically when a CD containing the program is placed into the computer containing the hard disk to be wiped. This makes it easier to perform batch wipes on many computers at once, and makes the hard disk wipe a feasible security solution for multiple hard disks.

Emergency Power Off Can Cause Havoc During a Disaster

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:18:36 -0600

EPO (Emergency Power Off), this feature on UPS systems can cause many problems to the smooth running of the power protection installation.

The primary reason for having this feature is to enable the UPS system to be 'made safe' in the event of an emergency. Operation of the Emergency Power Off will, with most uninterruptible power supplies, stop the inverter and rectifier (charger) and disconnect the battery. Due to the economics of size and cost, in a number of cases operation of the EPO circuit may just stop the inverter.

A typical example of a situation when there is a need to remove power to equipment in an emergency situation is in the case of fire. An un-interruptible power supply by its very name means that when the building is isolated it will continue to provide an output until the batteries are exhausted. The continued supply of power in these situations can lead to additional fires as cables are damaged by the original cause. The EPO in this situation is often connected to the fire alarm panel and will operate on the second and subsequent detection of fire within a defined area.

One of the major problems with Emergency Power Off circuits is that when they are originally installed everyone understands the concept and requirements to reset the circuit and restore the UPS system to normal operation. However as the years pass this knowledge is forgotten and when the UPS system suddenly stops for no reason it can take considerable time to identify the circuit that is causing the problem.

In effect, your un-interruptible power supplies suddenly are no longer uninterruptible once the EPO has been activated.

You must be very careful where the EPO is positioned, to avoid accidental or malicious use. Certainly each EPO needs to be monitored and covered y CCTV at the very least.

When the service engineer is called to site, they are looking for a failure within the UPS system, not normally the external circuits and re-establishing power to the load can take longer than expected.

Further problems with EPO circuits can be caused during the original installation of the UPS system where the designer, trying to make the operation of the EPO more secure may also connect the under-voltage trips of circuit breakers supplying the UPS system. This can make the service engineer's task even more daunting as there are normally few circuit diagrams available at the time of the incident and considerable time can be lost in tracing the circuits to restore supply to the load. Typically, in spite of any perceived problems with the UPS system at this time, the circuit to the maintenance bypass is not available either as it has tripped due to the operation of the EPO circuit so power can still not be restored to the load.

To assist with rapid restoration of supply to the load at the time of installation a laminated circuit diagram attached to the UPS system showing the circuit breakers feeding the UPS system, the load and their locations. In addition the operation of the EPO circuit should also be shown.

New Business Continuity Audit Program

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:47:30 -0600

Business Continuity Audit Program works in concert with the Security Audit Program

Janco Associates announced the availability of its awaited Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Audit Program.

Both of these audit programs are ones that either an external auditor, internal auditor can use to validate the compliance of the information technology function and the enterprise to ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

The DRP/BCP audit program was created to work in concert with the Janco IT infrastructure tools including;

Good DRP Lets IT Staff Act In Advance of Wildfires

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:51:17 -0600

A wild weekend for the IT crew

(Computerworld) -- The first warning that the CIO of Pepperdine University, had of the wildfire that would threaten the Malibu, Calif., campus came when the power went out in his home. It was 5 a.m. Sunday.

Within a matter of hours, brush fires came within 100 feet of the data center, and there was a point where we had serious concern that the data center itself was going to be jeopardized.

Chester was not the only one on campus who moved into action. Other administrators were responding as well, and by 5:30 a.m., the campus administration had called a meeting of the university Emergency Operations Committee.

On Sunday morning, however, Chester was by no means certain of the fires outcome. IT staff had been paged, and a half-dozen staffers were working to ensure that the data was safe.

Wildfires are an ongoing threat in the area, and the university is prepared for that contingency as well as other threats. It routinely sends its backup tapes to Iron Mountain Inc. for protection. In addition, the latest tape backup copies were moved to a fireproof safe. The ERP applications were shut down, and the hard drives were removed and also safely stored. All that work was completed in 35 minutes.

The whole purpose of planning is to make sure you have always got options so that when you find yourself in a situation, you are familiar what those options are as opposed to having to think them through with very little response time.

While the IT staff scrambled, the fire advanced toward the data center building and nearby university administration building. They had about 10 minutes notice that the fire was coming down the hill this way.

Firefighters from Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions acted immediately. There were about 25 firefighters in the way of the advancing fire whose entire goal was to protect the buildings. They were able to contain those fires and keep them from spreading further.

The Pepperdine University Data Center never went offline, ensuring the campus of network services, including voice communications.

IT Infrastructure After a Disaster Solution Offered by IBM and CISCO

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:57:35 -0600

(IT Jungle) When a disaster like Katrina hits, large swaths of infrastructure, such as power grids and communication lines, are taken out, compounding the difficulties of recovery. To help companies, organizations, and first-responders cope during the first hours or days following a disaster, IBM and Cisco Systems yesterday unveiled a new service that bundles electrical generators, phones, satellite and wireless connections, Windows servers, and software into portable units that can be transported by foot or truck into a disaster area.

IBM's Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) is no stranger to disasters. The IBM division, like its primary competitor Sungard, maintains scores of data centers across the continent running thousands of servers that can be used to recover clients' operations and keep it going for a while if their primary IT resources go down.

The Crisis Response offerings are pre-bundled packages that are designed to provide a one-stop emergency response communications network. Instead of forcing companies, governmental organizations, and first-responder groups to work with different vendors to assemble the equipment and communication services they'll need to establish a presence at the site of a disaster, the Crisis Reponses offering puts it all together for them.

IBM and Cisco unveiled four Crisis Response offerings yesterday at FOSE. They include the tactical communications kit (TCK), a suitcase-size kit that includes a BGAN satellite antenna that provides up to 300 kbps of voice or data bandwidth that can be shared among wired and wireless phones and computers. It ships with two wired phones and four wireless handsets that nestle in the lid, but it can support up to 16 phones, although only eight can be used at any given moment. The offerings also include a "fog cutter" (FC) device, which is a server-rack-size module that provides voice, data, and video capabilities as a mobile or fixed asset.

Moving up in size, we have the network emergency response vehicle (NERV I), a sport utility vehicle (SUV) providing a medium-scale network, communications and information-based services. At the top of the Crisis Response food chain is the command network emergency response vehicle (NERV III), a heavy-duty, six-wheeled truck that delivers a large-scale network, communications, and information-based services.

Janco has all of the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Templates that enterprises of all sizes can use.

DRP should focus on more than natural disasters

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:56:11 -0600

Historically, business continuity plans have tended to focus on natural disasters: fires, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. Security breaches must also be part of the overall plan. A virus-driven system failure could spread very quickly, compromising an entire world-wide enterprise. Any options proposed by a continuity plan should comply with existing production security standards and policies. Even if an enterprise is running in disaster mode, security procedures should not be compromised. Some minor disasters should even be engineered as way to gain entry to company systems and access to sensitive information.

Mid-Size Business Disaster Recovery Plan a Must

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:48:05 -0600

In enterprise level businesses, disaster recovery plans are often inadequate or outdated and in small to mid-sized businesses the situation is even worse: only a relatively small percentage have any form of plan. Why do so many businesses have such a lackadaisical approach to disaster recovery planning? Probably because it is a long and complicated process that ties up key personnel, can be costly to produce, and will change over time so it has a limited shelf life. And why spend time producing a document that may well never be needed? But any enterprise that ignores a DRP is gambling that a disaster will not strike and gambling with the livelihood of its employees and with the investments of shareholders and stakeholders. Why take such an unnecessary gamble? Why expose your business to such an unnecessary risk?

Compliance Regulations and Requirments Add to DRP and Business Continuity Planning

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:01:55 -0600

Companies are now more accountable for how information is stored, used and distributed - so it is imperative that data is managed and controlled correctly. In the United States, new legislation around the privacy of health and medical information enshrined in HIPAA rules, the need for financial and accounting compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley and new SEC controls related to share dealing scandals have raised the cost to business of noncompliance. In Europe, the Data Protection Act, Basel II, FSA regulations and EU94/96 are acting in the same fashion. All of this legislation forces companies to provide clear audit trails to ensure that email from their employees complies with financial disclosure and privacy regulations. In the United States and Europe, fines for non-compliance are potentially crippling and jail sentences for company directors who fall foul of the law are common. Businesses now have a legal requirement to stop their employees from breaching regulations.

Risk Assessment for your DRP / Business Continuity Plan

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:24:36 -0600

Business continuity is when an organization establishes proactive and reactive plans to help avoid crises and disasters, and quickly return to business as usual, should they occur. Do you have plans and technologies in place that prepare you for unexpected downtime?

Janco Associates know how important continuous business operations can be in an environment where one hour of system, application or web downtime can cost you more than you can afford. To help and identify the risks you face, Janco has a Business and IT Impact Impact Questionnaire.

Take a few minutes to review the content of the questionnaire which provides you key materials that look at risk froma a business continuity concept to implementation viewpoint. This questionnaie is designed for comfortable reading and navigation.

Back-up as a Service Model and Portable Devices Raise Security Issues

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:16:53 -0600

With the advent of USB large capacity storage and web based back-up services, the world of disaster recovery and business continuity is rapidly changing. That is at the cost of serious security risks for enterprises as critical and confidential information is dispersed across many platforms and exposed to more opportunities for theft and loss.

Violations to PCI DSS standards and Sarbanes Oxley Section 404 requirements are an area of focus that everyone needs to be concerned about. The Security Manual Template and Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template address these isses.

Janco Disaster and Business Continuity Now the International Standard

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:17 -0600

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template Now Accepted as the International Standard

Version 4.4 of the Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template has just been released by Janco Associates..

Park City, UT The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity template has been sold to enterprise in over 65 countries around the globe. With the release a of version 4.4 of the template it is in complete compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.

M V Janulaitis the CEO of Janco said, "Our DRP /BCP Template has been accepted by enterprise around the globe as the standard for disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan creation." In response to that need Janco has updated its "Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template" by increasing the content of the template as well as updating the entire document to be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, ITIL (Ver. 3), ISO 17799, and PCI DSS.

The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in over 65 countries around the globe including:

Angola
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Bermuda
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
Cayman Islands
Columbia
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Egypt

Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kenya
Lebanon
Lithuania

Macao
Malta
Mexico
Mozambique
Namibia
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nigeria
Norway
Panama
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Republic of Ireland
Romania

Russia
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sri Lanka
Swaziland
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad & Tobago
Uganda
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Zambia

The Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Plan has been purchased for use in government, public, and private enterprises in almost all industries including:

Federal Government
State Governments
Local Governments
Law Firms
Think Tanks
Chemical
Telecommunication
Real Estate
Manufacturing

Universities
School Districts
Consulting Firms
Banks
Financial Service
Investment Banks
Credit Unions
Outsourcers
Property Mgt

Heavy Industry
Light Industry
Distribution
Retail
Hospitality
Energy
Insurance
Medical
ISPs

Application Development
Construction
Graphics
Entertainment
Paper Products
Defense
Aerospace
Media

Is Your Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plan up to date?

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:10:23 -0600

It used to be easy to create a Disaster Recovery plan. You would back up your mainframe every evening or at least over the weekend and then ship the backu-up tapes off-site. Now you have to worry about much more.

Mainframe
Departmental File Servers
Branch Offices & Retail Locations
Wireless Network File Servers
Data at Outsourced Sites
Desktop workstations
Laptop Work Stations
PDAs and Smart phones

The latest version of Jancos Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template addresses each of these areas. Click here to download the Table of Contents for the template.

WiFi After a Disaster

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:33:22 -0600

(IT Business Edge) Are municipal wireless projects better positioned as primarily infrastructure to aid government and business or consumers and tourists? Of course, an existing network, no matter who it primarily serves on a normal day, can be put to good use in an emergency. We're not too sure how great the technical differences are between the two approaches. The point is that the distinction can be vital during the critical funding phase. It's instructive to examine the story of how the subsidiary of U.S. Internet that is working on Wireless Minneapolis pitched in when a bridge spanning the Mississippi collapsed. As the tragedy unfolded, the subsidiary disabled the network's paid log-in process, thus making connectivity freely available. Within hours, about six times the normal 1,000 paid users were on the system.

Disasters Don't Care If You're Ready

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:54:30 -0600

Unforeseen events that disrupt business will happen. It's just a matter of time. Disasters impact everyone, but technology is usually burdened the most because it's your job to get the operation back up and running! So, you never want to get stuck without a plan.

The Disaster Recovery Plan Template is a freshly-updated resource available to subscribers that will quickly and logically guide you through the planning process. From viruses to hurricanes, this resource will help your company respond to any type of technology-related disaster and minimize your business downtime.

Make Sure Your Business is Not a Casualty of the Next Big Disaster

The Disaster Recovery Plan Template is a practical tool that can help any organization work through the nuts and bolts of disaster recovery planning. Taking a consequences-based approach, this resource will help your company respond to multiple types of technology related disasters, from virus incidents to hurricanes.

This newly updated package, produced by Janco Associates, has all of the information and tools you need to prepare Disaster Recovery Plan documents that meet your business specific needs.

Cisco Web Site Goes Down!!!!!

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:38:26 -0600

(Computerworld) -- A power outage caused by an accident at a San Jose, Calif., data center blacked out the Cisco.com site for three hours today.

Cisco was able to communicate the problem over its official blog, but word about the cause came via e-mail from a spokeswoman at 5 p.m. EST.

We have traced the cause of the issue to an accident during maintenance of a San Jose data center that resulted in a power outage in that facility, the spokeswoman said. We would like to thank our customers and partners for their patience. We expect to resolve the issue shortly.

Users around the U.S. reported the outage sometime before 2 p.m. EST via various blogs, and then noted that service was restored about 4:50 p.m. EST.

Cisco did not describe the duration of the outage or exactly what happened and why a backup system was not available to quickly restore service, as would be common with a large Web site -- especially one run by the largest networking vendor in the world.

Bloggers questioned what was happening, and asked whether such a normally resilient site could have been attacked before they found out about the data center accident.

With all its mighty power, network behemoth's main website www.cisco.com is down, wrote slidersv at Slashdot. No news describing the reason as of now. I have tried accessing the site for the past hour, since our operations heavily rely on Cisco online documentation, with no luck. After all the advocacy of high-availability, security and performance.... Oh, the irony.

Business Contunity is now more of a challenge

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:26:26 -0600

With expectations for system availability continually increasing and more businesses relying on 24 x 7 mission-critical applications, disaster recovery planning has risen to the forefront of IT's priorities. But complexities and costs associated with implementing a comprehensive data protection strategy often keep the vision from becoming reality, whether due to time, bandwidth and budget restraints.

The DRP / BC is the one answer that we can all agree on. It is current, meets all mandated needs like Sarbanes-Oxley, and is compliant to ITIL.

Back-up Power Failure Shuts down Major Web Host Provider

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:10:11 -0600

(IDG News Service) -- SAN FRANCISCO -- A Web hosting company cited a faulty controller as the reason its backup electrical system failed during a San Francisco power outage last week, dousing the Web sites of several customers.

Service was interrupted to 40% of 365 Main Inc.'s customers when an electrical surge caused Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the local utility, to shut off power. Three of 10 backup generators failed to start at 365 Main, and the Web sites Craigslist.com, RedEnvelope.com, Yelp.com, Technorati.com and others went down for about 45 minutes.

365 Main traced the generator failures to a weakness in a controller in backup diesel generators. An incorrect setting on the device -- called a DDEC, for Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller -- was not allowing it to correctly reset its memory. Erroneous data left in the DDECs memory subsequently caused the diesel generators to misfire or fail to start, the company said.

365 Main corrected the settings on all the generators at its San Francisco data center and at another center it operates in El Segundo, Calif., because both use the same model of generators from Hitec Power Protection Ltd. Three other 365 Main data centers use other Hitec models.

The power outage resulted in 365 Main breaking the service-level agreements it has with its client Web sites. As a result, 365 Main said it will refund a portion of the monthly Web hosting fee that clients pay.

Even with last weeks outage, the San Francisco data center has delivered 99.9942% uptime, but that is no consolation to clients whose Web sites were out of service.

What we learned from this is that there remains a delta between any number of 9s and perfection.

Disaster Plan and Business Continuity Template Updated

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:52:41 -0600

Continuing on it quest to be the most current Disaster Plan Template in the market, Janco has updated its DRP / Busniess Continuity Template for the second time this year. 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 .

DRP Data Protection for Remote Offices

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:18:23 -0600

Many organizations are struggling with the massive changes in data storage requirements that have transpired over the last decade. The almost exponential growth of business critical data from email, e-commerce, and electronic systems shows no sign of decreasing. With relatively new data types such as voice and video now in use, enterprise storage administrators will soon have to manage petabytes of data.

According to a recent study by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, the world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes and printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003 percent of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard-drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is becoming the universal medium for information storage.

Physical and cyber attack - DRP Implications

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:18:02 -0600

(Jeff Bardin - Blog) - The combination of a physical and cyber attack using our own infrastructure is inevitable. Attempts have already been made and continue to be made.

It is easy to appreciate the devastation of a physical attack and what it can bring because as Americans, we need to see things in order to understand them. But we must not underestimate the potentially devastating consequences of an electronic attack, especially when used in conjunction with or as a precursor to a physical attack. It may be just that cyber attack that enables the physical attack. Just like our combined sea, air and land battle plans, cyber is a core component.

Our first responders depend upon our electronic infrastructure in order to respond to physical attacks. If we suffer a devastating blow to our electronic capabilities that stymies our efforts to respond to the corresponding physical attacks, and clogs the cyber arteries we depend upon, there will be a new 9/11 report asking why once more.

In April of this year, a former engineer at the nation's largest nuclear power plant (Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station outside Phoenix) was charged with taking computer access codes and software to Iran and using it to download details of plant control rooms and reactors. Using these codes could potentially combine the two (electronic/physical) for a massive loss of life and thousands of years of radiation contamination. Are you scared yet?

Information technology strikes are number two on Al Qaedas (pronounced Al-Qaw-ed-da) list for strikes at our economy.

How many of the 9/11 attackers were from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? How many study computer science and engineering in the US? Thousands! When living in Saudi, several organizations required students to attend the University of Tampa not far from the US Special Operations Command and Cincom and of course, return to the KSA. Those who were corrupted by the infidels in this country faced significant scrutiny and pressure. Some linked to the royals even faced a potential stint in the Rub Al-Khali or Empty Quarter. Regardless, the point is that when they return with their new found knowledge, they have no real job which turns to apathy, anger and attendance at the radicalized schools or as they are known in the West as madrasa (or school).

Electronic jihad sections of online jihadist sites host the cyber war information and gives up to the minute instructions or warnings of website penetration, suggestions for targets or timing of attacks, with detailed advice on the methods.

Just to ensure you have the proper level of paranoia and fear, there is a book and movie entitled Ameristan by Charles Welty. The major premise is that the United States of America becomes a conservative Muslim state where Islamic Sharia is the law of the land. You can even download it for a small fee.

Pakistanis harbor Usama bin Laden and the rest of terror incorporated while we prop up a Shah Reza Pahlavi type regime that already has nuclear weapons. General Musharrafs regime is on shaky ground. Pakistanis have since October 2001 attempted cyber jihad against the US. We all know what happened on Novermber 4, 1979 in Teheran, dont we.

What will you do when the day comes? What will I do for that matter when we are hit? Are you and your security and risk teams read for such activity? Is our critical infrastructure prepared for such a hit that is not only multi-vector but multi-faceted in its approach? Will we be prepared? Inshallah bukarah

U. of Fla. building device that simulates hurricanes

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:15:07 -0600

(Computerworld) -- The University of Florida is constructing a portable machine that can simulate intense weather conditions for researchers trying to better understand how building components react to hurricane force winds and rain.

The massive hydraulic fuel-powered device will simulate the impact of hurricane-strength winds and rain on windows, doors, roofs and other building components made of timber and masonry products, said an assistant professor in the department of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The $500,000 project aims to help researchers better uncover the origin and path of water intrusion and to innovate new products that ultimately make homes more resilient during hurricane landfalls.

The device, designed to produce 130-mph wind speeds and create 30-40 pounds per square foot of dynamic pressure, will be stationed on a trailer with wheels for simplified transport. The 50,000-lb., 2,800-horsepower device includes four diesel engines and eight 5-in. vane axial fans.

The construct is powered by a hydraulic unit fuel system spinning the massive fans. Different contraction ducts can be added to the downwind side of the fans to contract airflow based on application, while a hydraulic actuated rudder system enables wind direction to be easily changed.

Preparing for Disasters

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 05:50:08 -0600

Preparation for Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity in light of SOX, HIPAA, and ISO 17799 is a must for enterprises of all sizes. The first concern is putting systems in place to completely protect all financial and other data required to meet the reporting regulations and to archive the data to meet future requests for clarification of those reports. The second is to clearly and expressly document all these procedures so that in the event of a SOX audit, the auditors clearly see that the DR plan exists and will appropriately protect the data.

Where will your management team be when disaster strikes? They could be anywhere --at work -- on vacation-- or in the car. How will you find each other? Will you know if your employees are safe?

Disaster can strike quickly and without warning. It can force you to evacuate your offices or confine you to your home. What would you do if basic services -- water, gas, electricity or telephones -- were cut off? Local officials and relief workers will be on the scene after a disaster, but they cannot reach everyone right away.

Enterprises can - and do - cope with disaster by preparing in advance and working together as a team.

Google backup plan

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:20:52 -0600

(IDG News Service) -- PARIS -- It is hard to imagine the online ad market cooling off, but when it eventually does, companies that make their living from it would do well to have a backup plan.

Best known for consumer services, Google has several products for businesses, including search appliances, a paid version of Google Apps and a service that provides Web site hosting and online storage.

That business is likely to become, over the period you are describing, a very significant business, because it utilizes our infrastructure and it utilizes Googles scale.

It will have to iron out some teething problems first, however. Google has faced complaints from customers that it was unable to meet service-level agreements for Google Apps.

Lost Files on Disks are Hard to Find

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:06:49 -0600

Files on a hard disk are stored in discrete clusters, which may reside within or across specific regions of the disk called sectors. Those clusters may be contiguous, or they may be scattered across many sectors.

The file system creates a file record that points to the locations on the disk where all of the fragments that belong to a given file name reside and identifies the order in which to properly reassemble them. If a utility program or recovery professional can find the record of the deleted file and none of the data it points to has been overwritten, then recovery should not be a problem. But if that file record is unavailable and the data is not contiguous on the disk, it can be difficult or even impossible to completely reassemble the original file in the proper order.

At one time there was a chance of resurrecting data from an overwritten area. Not anymore. There is no chance of recovery with overwritten clusters. The bit density on hard disk drives is so great now that when the magnetics are rewritten, the data is gone.

If the file record has been overwritten or has been damaged but the data is undamaged and unfragmented, a file recovery utility should be able to find and recover it. Every file type -- .doc (Word document), .jpg (JPEG image), etc. -- has a different signature that indicates the beginning of the file on disk. The utility searches all of the unallocated space on the disk, sector by sector, for file headers that match the desired signature. The program then captures the data in each subsequent sector until another signature is found -- or until an arbitrary limit is reached. The user can then review the files that are recovered to find the desired file.

If the file record is unavailable and some data is damaged, you may still be able to recover some types of files with a signature search. If you regularly defragmented the hard disk drive before the deletion occurred, your chances of recovery are greater.

Disaster Plan Measuring Success With Metrics

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:43:40 -0600

Security, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity

Metrics provide the mechanism by which you can measure the success of your disaster recovery and business continuity process.

Metrics for disaster recovery and business continuity are somewhat different from those used to measure other functions, because they are a combination of project status and test runs of infrastructure.

Indicators of success include:

Frequency of reports from the disaster recovery and business continuity group to senior management.
Percentage of the enterprises employees represented on the recovery team that are involved in disaster recovery and business continuity processes.
Number and frequency of tests and audits to verify implementation of the disaster recovery and business continuity and the scope of the reports on gaps and risks.
Frequency of review and updated processes that includes the deployment of new solutions.
Timelines and success of the disaster recovery and business continuity handling, effectiveness, and impact on the business (after a disaster occurs).

Chinese Military Plans for the Next War To Be Electronic

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:18:48 -0600

The Chinese military has developed cyberwarfare first-strike capabilities that include units charged with developing viruses to attack enemy computer networks, a Department of Defense (DoD) report warned last Friday.

The PLA [Peoples Liberation Army] has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, and tactics and measures to protect friendly computer systems and networks, the Pentagon annual report to Congress on Chinese military power said. In 2005, the PLA began to incorporate offensive CNO [computer network operations] into its exercises, primarily in first strikes against enemy networks.

This newest report shows how the Chinese military thinking on information warfare has changed in recent years.

Failure Prompts Brewery to Tap Hosted E-mail Service

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:57:08 -0600

(Computerworld) -- Before upgrading its IT infrastructure to its current setup of 12 Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. servers, VMware Inc. virtualization software and a hosted e-mail service last year, Boulevard Brewing had relied on a single Microsoft Corp. Windows NT-based server to run its operation.

The single server proved inadequate in late 2005, when a hardware failure cut off access to Boulevards e-mail system, causing the organization to lose two days of productivity.

They had people literally say, I can not work; I need to go home. The company was shut down. When the server went down and e-mail went down, they were helpless. E-mail was the companys primary vehicle for communicating with its 75 distributors and for booking tours of the brewery.

As more and more businesses shift toward using e-mail as a mechanism for processing orders rather than simply as a communication medium, unmanaged data stores and slow response times could prove to be more perilous than they once were.

The timeliness of e-mail delivery is becoming much more critical. If there is an outage you may be unaware of incoming orders that are especially time-sensitive or from a very big client.

CIOs see a need for Improved Security Policies, Procedures, and Practices

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:18:51 -0600

Security is needed by enterprises of all sizes

Three-quarters of CIOs have confidence in their companys IT security, but there are plenty of reasons to wonder why they do. In an e-week survey 14 CIOs were asked about IT security practices and several general practices for protecting customer and employee data. Of these practices, only three are in place at 80 percent or more of our respondents' companies. Some policies, such as rules governing working with company data outside the office, the use of instant messaging, and password protection for hard drives, are done by only about half of respondents.

The reality? IT security is still riddled with holes. Antivirus software is almost ubiquitous and VPNs are now commonplace, but that's not enough to ensure security. If companies want to get serious about preventing thieves from stealing data, they will have to start closing these gaps.

Multiple data centers reduce risk

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:45:54 -0600

Despite the consolidation trend, some companies are continuing to branch out with their data centers for reasons including redundancy of the centralized data center for backup, a more comprehensive disaster recovery plan and better uptime at regional offices.

Indeed, some companies actually prefer this approach, and experts say it makes sense for organizations such as those with branch employees who can act as IT technicians or firms with locations dispersed on different continents.

The advantage is leveraging existing space, rather than having to build additional data center capacity. With virtualization, you can make the satellite data centers appear as one big data center -- the users have no idea where the physical devices reside, nor do they care. It also builds in local redundancy -- unless the entire building is affected. You can also shut down one satellite data center and have another pick up the functionality during technology refreshes and upgrades.

DRP - Tool To Bulletproof Your Enterprise

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 09 May 2007 06:16:05 -0600

It was not long ago that disaster recovery and business continuity technologies were mostly about backup. Business processes did not depend on technology to the degree they do today. If access to applications was lost, most departments or business units could revert to manual processes while data was being restored from tape or hardware and applications were rebuilt and redeployed.

Except for the largest global enterprises, most organizations did not have the need or the budget for costly business continuity technologies, such as long distance replication and application failover. Those that did mainly used basic two-node application failover for a handful of mission critical applications. Many did not even have a backup strategy in place.

Katrina: Tales of Survival

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:34:46 -0600

(Computerworld) -- Even some 18 months after Hurricane Katrina, both Northrop Grumman Corp. and its employees are still recovering. Northrop is still negotiating insurance claims and continues work on projects at its Gulf Coast facilities. Even now, we were still dealing with restoration activities, says Ken Lehman, group director of shared services operations.

Anita Logan, director of employee relations for Northrop Grummans Ship Systems sector, returned to work on the third day to find employees there who had nowhere else to go. At the shipyard, some found that their offices had totally washed away. Other buildings were still standing but uninhabitable. She says it is hard to imagine the work conditions people faced. You worked wherever you could find a space. There was no running water. There was no air conditioning. It was over 100 degrees, she says.

With her building gone, she and her co-workers set up temporary quarters outdoors. We were outside under someones umbrella. People brought in lawn chairs. Some of our tables consisted of the spools that wire came on, she says. One worker brought over his motor home.

But if the conditions on site during those first few days were difficult, they were nothing compared with the sheer terror that people like Barbara Harris family experienced at the height of the storm. Harris, IT program manager for Northrop Grummans IT sector, decided to ride out the storm at her home, which sits 10 feet above the ground on stilts. At the height of the storm, waters rose to chest height inside her home, forcing Harris, her husband and son to swim out a window in search of higher ground.

I was in a state of disbelief as I was watching everything I owned actually being destroyed by the strength of the winds and rising water, and I don???t know when I???ve felt more helpless as I realized there was absolutely nothing that I could do to prevent the destruction or to protect anything in the house.

As they prepared to evacuate, Harris had to decide which few things to take with her. As my mind was trying to sort through the reality of losing everything, I knew I had to try to save at least some of the small pictures of the children. And I had some very special pieces of jewelry from family that no amount of money could ever replace, and I put them in a Ziploc bag, she says. She also packed her laptop and BlackBerry before swimming through a window into the storm outside.

There was about 14 feet of water at the location of my house when we began our swim out to safety -- and it was rising rapidly, she says. She estimates that the water crested at 17 or 18 feet before the storm was over. We were swimming against the hurricane winds and against the flow of water, so it was extremely challenging, she says.

Harris and her husband swam a quarter mile through the storm and took refuge in a car port that was open to the winds because the doors had blown off. The carport where we took refuge was about a quarter mile up the road from my house. It is in the area where we moved the cars during hurricanes because the elevation was higher and the cars have always been safe from the rising waters. But not this time, she says. They rode out the storm there, where Harris stood in water up to her neck, for about five hours before the winds and storm surge finally abated. Then we waded [and] walked back out for about a mile and a half before someone picked us up and took us to safety.

AC failure takes out Florida state computers

rss@e-janco.com — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:01:06 -0600

A massive air-conditioning failure at a state office complex in Tallahassee shut down government computer traffic statewide and forced emergency managers to begin studying backup plans.

Rising temperatures posed an immediate threat to a $30 million state computer system in the Shared Resource Center, a highly secure, windowless brick complex that serves as the electronic nerve center for much of state government.

Computer traffic from 84 agencies and local governments, including some non-profit groups, flows through it daily.

Temperatures in a 9,276-square-foot room filled with 1,200 computer servers hovered at 90-degrees earlier today. Technicians like to keep the room chilled to 68 degrees and expect the equipment to start failing at 95 degrees.

Apple's Backup improves memory management

rss@e-janco.com — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 06:41:00 -0600

(Computerworld) -- Apple's Backup software has been updated to version 3.1.1 and is available for download from Apple's Web site. It's a free update.

Backup is utility software offered to users of Apple's subscription-based .Mac service. It enables you to back up important files, using either your .Mac iDisk or local media, including hard drives, CDs or DVDs. An active .Mac account is necessary for Backup to work.

New features in the 3.1.1 update include improvements to backup and restoration using external hard disk drives; better memory management and better restore of bundled file types.

System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later.

ISO 17799, SOX, HIPPA Compliant Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template Released

rss@e-janco.com — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 15:00:41 -0600

The ISO 17799 compliant Disaster Recovery Planning (Business Continuity) Template is Version 4.2. The template has increased in size from 140 pages in version 3.1 to 189 pages in the current version.

New with this version of the Disaster Recovery Planning Template are:

Added Section defining the ISO 17799 compliance requirements
Reviewed and modified entire DRP/BCP template to ensure compliance with ISO 17799
Business & IT Impact Questionnaire updated to meet ISO 17799 compliance requirements
Added Best Data Retention and Destruction Practices section

IT is critical to business continuity. So why haven't more organizations started planning?

rss@e-janco.com — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 11:06:31 -0600

(Computerworld) -- Monday morning, 9 a.m. The CEO calls you into an executive meeting as word comes that a full-blown H5N1 avian influenza pandemic is spreading rapidly from central Asia. Your job: Keep mission-critical IT systems working despite staff absenteeism rates that could reach 40% at the height of the pandemic, which is expected to run its course over a period of six to eight weeks.

Supply chain disruptions are expected as countries close their borders, so you can not count on spare parts. With emergency travel restrictions in effect, you can forget about moving staffers between global locations to cope with labor shortages. You also need to enable remote access for an unprecedented number of employees who will either be out sick, caring for ill family members or afraid to come to the office. You have weeks, possibly just days, before the outbreak overtakes one of your major data centers.

Are You Ready?

For many businesses, the answer is probably no.

Setting up a storage network in your home

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 16:58:08 -0600

(Computerworld) -- With five computers in my home/office, I told myself, the last thing I need is to add a shared network storage device to the clutter. But I had been eyeing these systems with interest for some time, hoping prices would come down. Now, with retail sticker prices for consumer versions now around $200 for 250GB or more of shared disk space, it was time to take a serious look at what these devices can do for the small office and home office user.

These network-attached storage (NAS) devices connect directly to your home office network and provide a shared storage space thats independent of any individual machine. Such devices used to be expensive, industrial-grade products, but small, consumer market units are selling in increasing numbers out of retail stores such as Staples and Best Buy. The units come with an Ethernet patch cable that you plug into an open port on your Ethernet switch or router. Once its attached to your network, any computer on your network wireless or wired should be able to use the device.

If your computers are networked, shared network storage devices offer an easy way to share files, and most include backup software that should allow for painless, set-it-and-forget-it automated backups of the data residing on all of your network-attached computers.

ISO 17799 Security Manual Template with Job Descriptions

rss@e-janco.com — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:46:44 -0600

The Security Manual for the Internet and Information Technology is over 200 pages in length. This electronic document is fully compliant with the ISO 17799 standard, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA standard, and the Patriot Act.

All versions of the Security Manual template include both the Business & IT Impact Questionnaire and the Threat & Vulnerability Assessment Tool (both were redesigned to address Sarbanes Oxley compliance). In addition, the Security Manual Template PREMIUM Edition contains 16 detail job descriptions that apply specifically to security and Sarbanes Oxley. The job descriptions are:

Chief Security Officer (CSO)

Chief Compliance Officer (COO)

VP Strategy and Architecture

Director e-Commerce

Database Administrator

Data Security Administrator

Manager Data Security

Manager Facilities and Equipment

Manager Network and Computing Services

Manager Network Services

Manager Training and Documentation

Manager Voice and Data Communication

Manager Wireless Systems

Network Security Analyst

System Administrator - Unix

System Administrator - Windows

NEC desktops have caught fire in Japan

rss@e-janco.com — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:55:12 -0600

(IDG News Service) -- Two NEC Corp. desktop computers in Japan have caught fire since late last year, and NEC is now offering to replace faulty power units at the root of the problem, the electronics giant said Monday.

The first Valuestar computer caught fire in October 2005 and the second in November this year, said Akiko Shikimori, an NEC spokeswoman. The culprit is a component within the power unit inside the computer. The component and the power unit are not manufactured by NEC, but Shikimori did not reveal which company makes them.

The power unit overheats, and if the customer continues to use the desktop, it can cause a fire, she said.

Hard-disk autoloader a tape killer?

rss@e-janco.com — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:54:12 -0600

(Computerworld) -- Having no backup regimen for your files is courting disaster, but the two most popular approaches, hard drives and tape drives, do have their drawbacks. Hard drives, no matter how large, still have a finite capacity. Add another drive, and you end up paying to duplicate much of the drive hardware you've already purchased. Tape, while the more popular solution -- and near infinite in capacity because of its cartridge approach, is a comparatively fragile medium that's prone to failure from handling and because the tape medium will degrade over time.

Avoiding Data Migration Delays

webmaster — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:38:22 -0600

(Computerworld) -- As a technical matter, migrating data from an old computer system to a new one should be straightforward. There are common industry practices that can help, such as running field-mapping and conversion scripts, and using extract, transform and load tools. So why does data migration so often turn good IT projects into bad ones, with embarrassing delays that drag on for weeks or months?

Delays are often the result of getting off on the wrong foot failing to adequately plan the approach to data migration at the outset. The technical issues can be complex, but at least they are predictable. It is the nontechnical strategy that often causes delays down the road.

DRP That Does Not Work

support @ e-janco.com — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:57:05 -0600

(InfoWorld) -- CompUSA and the Dummies books are teaching users just enough of the tech alphabet to spell trouble. A network that was severely hacked by someone who came in from the outside and deleted the main Exchange message store. Firewall logs had gotten the local IT admin nowhere, so we were called in to do a little snooping around. Another guy on the team had the sense to run AirSnort. He found a wide open Linksys wireless access point in about six seconds.

The internal admin insisted there was no wireless running anywhere on the network. It took some sneaker netting, but we found the rogue AP in a senior executives office about 20 minutes later. Seemed he saw how cheap they were at the local CompUSA and decided to plug one into the secondary network port in his office so he could use his notebook wireless instead of the wired connection because no wires -- looked better.

Another problem in this vein is USB. Being able to plug in a peripheral and achieve working status without the need to install drivers has rapidly spread the popularity of personal peripherals. You do not want to get yourself get sucked into supporting things such as printers that are not on your official purchase list -- or external hard disks, DVD drives, sound systems, and even monitors.

Nor do you want the security risk of an employee plugging in a gig or two of empty space into any workstations USB port and copying important corporate information. Source code, accounting data, and historical records all can be copied quickly and then walk out in somebodys hip pocket.

Solution: Let employees know what is and is not acceptable as corporate peripherals. Keep an accurate asset record of what belongs to the IT department so you can more easily find or ignore the stuff that does not. And if data theft is a problem, think about protecting yourself by disabling USB drives, uninstalling CD-RW drives, or similar measures. The work you do now can save your bacon later.

Moral: Asset management is not just for the anal. Knowing exactly what is supposed to be on your network is a key step to solving a wide variety of IT mysteries.

Morocco jails two over Zotob worm

support @ e-janco.com — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:16:00 -0600

A Moroccan court on Tuesday jailed two men for one and two years for unleashing computer worms that disrupted networks across the United States, court officials and lawyers said.

The court in Sale, twin city to the Moroccan capital Rabat, convicted 19-year-old science student Farid Essebar and his friend Achraf Bahloul, 22, for their role in creating and spreading the Zotob worm last year.

Moroccan authorities said the two men had one accomplice in Turkey, who was named earlier by the FBI as Atilla Ekici.

Zotob caused computer outages at more than 100 U.S. companies, including major media outlets like CNN and The New York Times. But it did not create widespread havoc like software programs such as SQL Slammer and MyDoom.

Ripping and replacing can be a September budget booster

support @ e-janco.com — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:31:07 -0600

(Computerworld) -- September is a critical budget month for a lot of organizations, and IT groups are scrambling to save every dollar possible. Some IT veterans say you need look no further than your own network's aging technologies and manual processes to cobble together some last-minute savings or get a jump on the next budget year.

They recommend ripping and replacing any older technology and manual procedures that drain help desk resources, waste valuable storage space and cost ongoing licensing fees. For many of these network dinosaurs, there are viable replacements that allow you to streamline management and support, consolidate resources and free up expensive real estate. Here are a few of their recommendations.

Blog Policy Template Released

webmaster — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 08:48:58 -0600

Janco Associates released its Blog and Personal Web Site Policy.

The Blog and Personal Web Site Template includes a detailed Policy statement with specific guidelines for blog and web site participation, security standards, and Blog Policy Compliance Agreement form which all employees, contractors, sub-contactors and affiliates should complete. This template can be purchased on its own and is included it the IT Service Management Template.

In a recent AMA survey it was found that only 9 percent have policies governing personal blogging on company time, 7 percent have policies on business blogging and appropriate content, and even fewer (3 percent) retain blog content. The risks faced by enterprises of all sizes include copyright infringement, sexual harassment and trade secret theft not to mention the drain on employee productivity.

IT Service Management SOA Policy Template Released by Janco

support@e-janco.com — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:09:16 -0600

Janco has just released its IT Service Management SOA Policy Template. The Service-Oriented Architecture policy template is an 107 page document that contains standards, policies and procedures, metrics and service level agreement for the help desk, change control, service requests, blog / personal web site, and travel and off-site meetings. It also contains a Change Request Form, Business and IT Impact Questionnaire, and an Internet Use Approval Form. The template is availalable in Microsoft Word format or PDF file.

Long-term cell use raises brain tumor risk

webmaster — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:39:16 -0600

The use of mobile phones over a long period of time can raise the risk for brain tumors, a new Swedish study said, contradicting the conclusions of other researchers.

The Dutch Health Council, in an overview of research from around the world, last year found no evidence radiation from mobile phones and TV towers was harmful. A four-year British survey released in January showed no link between regular, long-term use of cell phones and the most common type of tumor.

However, researchers at the Swedish National Institute for Working Life said they looked at the mobile phone use of 905 people between the age of 20 and 80 who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and found a link.

Next Disaster Requires Culture of Preparedness

webmaster — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:46:47 -0600

At the center of the recent White House report "Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned," there is a call to foster a new, robust culture of preparedness.

The challenge comes after the report details the long list of tragedies that last years deadly hurricane wrought, including more than 1,330 deaths and $96 billion in property damage. In terms of communications, 38 centers that normally handled 911 calls failed, while 3 million customers lost phone service.

The report urges a wide variety of players to build this new culture, including myriad federal agencies and tens of thousands of state and local emergency first responder agencies. And it calls on private citizens and the private sector to take part.

Wi-Fi Proves Itself in a Disaster Area

support@e-janco.com — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:20:13 -0600

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.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template Released

support@e-janco.com — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 17:10:02 -0600

The Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template Version 4.0 was just released. It is a MS Word document that can be used as a DRP - BCP template for any enterprise. The template and supporting material have been updated to be Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA compliant. The Disaster Planning Template includes:

Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Template
Business and IT Impact Analysis Questionnaire
Work Plan

New with version 4.0 are:

Vendor Disaster Recovery Questionnaire
Vendor Phone List Form Updated
Key Customer Notification Form
Critical Resources to be Retrieved Form
Business Continuity Off-Site Materials Form
Department Disaster Recovery Planning Workbook

Go to http://www.e-janco.com/drp.htm

One-Third of Techies Don't Use Passwords

support@e-janco.com — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:48:58 -0600

Security-conscious IT pro, heal thyself: A Pointsec Mobile Technologies survey has found that one-third of IT pros are not using passwords or any other security to protect data on their smartphones or PDAs. And one-tenth of respondents said they had corporate info, PINs and other important data stored on the devices. Though those who hadn't backed up their info worried that they'd lose "everything" if their device was stolen or lost, they apparently choose to live dangerously. Just 40 percent who had a device stolen or lost reported it to the police, believing that it would be a waste of time and money to do so.

File Sharing Network Shut Down

support@e-janco.com — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:48:43 -0600

Swiss and Belgian police have shut down a major component of the eDonkey file-sharing network, used mainly to trade copies of copyrighted movies and music.

Razorback 2 was the biggest server on the eDonkey peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which transfers data from user to user. Music companies have blamed P2P piracy for causing a drastic downturn in sales, and Hollywood is trying to prevent a similar impact on the movie business.

"Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home," the MPA said in a statement. "At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem near Brussels."

As of last year, eDonkey was estimated to have up to 3 million users spread over 100 to 200 servers. Razorback2 was the most popular server, used by about 1 million users.

ITSM Template Updated

support@e-janco.com — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 05:18:12 -0600

The IT Productivity Center, a division of Janco Associates, Inc. announced an update to IT Service Management Template. IT Service Management (ITSM) is defined as part of a rapidly accepted standard of best practices known as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The IT Service Management template joins the IT Productivity Center's CIO and IT Productivity series of tools and templates which include their popular Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Resource Kit and Disaster Recovery Plan Template. The ITSM update can be found at http://www.itproductivity.org/itsm.htm.

Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco and the IT Productivity Center said "IT infrastructure productivity is the core of our firm's practice. We have created a set of tools to improve the productivity and quality of service provided by the IT function. With the IT Service Management Template and our Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Resource Kit enterprises of all sizes can quickly implement best practices." In addition he said. "... the IT Service Management template is now included in the CIO Productivity Bundle." The CIO Productivity Bundle, which is Sarbanes-Oxley compliant can be found at http://www.itproductivity.org/offer_cio.htm.

The IT Service Management Template ( http://www.itproductivity.org/itsm.htm ) contains policies, standards, procedures and metrics for Change Control, Help Desk and Service Request processing. The ITSM Template also contains the IT Productivity Center's Business and IT Impact Questionnaire, a Change Control Request Form and an Internet Use Approval Form. The template comes as a word document which can be used as a template to create customized procedures for any size enterprise.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Resource Kit (http://www.itproductivity.org/SOX.htm ) which was released in January now has a Platinum Edition which contains the IT Service Management Template.

Janco also announced the activation of its new web site www.it-toolkits.com. The site provides productivity tools for IT and the Chief Information Officer in particular. Included are Janco's Browser Study, CIO Productivity Kit, Disaster Recovery Template, Security Template, IT Salary Survey, IT Job Descriptions, and Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Resource Kit.

Disaster Recovery Planning Template News Feed Launched

support@e-janco.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 10:00:14 -0600

The Disaster Recovery Planning Template dot com RSS News feed has just been launched. The focus of the feed is Disaster Recovery Planning and Security related issues.

This feed joins the IT management series of feeds published by Janco Associates, Inc. The feeds include:

Disaster Recovery Planning Template

Business continuity planning for a Pandemic

Cloud Recovery Not Easy - Disaster Recovery Not Under User Control

What is a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Cloud is not as secure as many thought

Improve your RTO and RPO

Disaster Recovery GuideBusiness Continuity Planning

ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 17799, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA Compliant

Huge Waves - Office Buildings and Businesses Demolished

Disater Plan Manual - CIO and CSO conflict

A disaster occurs -- now what?

Disasters can occur any where at any time

Network Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity CIO's Concern

State of Texas disaster recovery plan in jeopardy

A network outage is a disaster

DRP Backup Solutions

Backup is the primary Disaster Plan for Many SMBs

Disaster Plan Common Failures

Minimun and Standard Power Protection for Workstations for DRP and BCP

Disaster planning, emergency preparedness, or business continuity

The Difference Between Disaster Recovery Planning and Business Continuity Planning Defined

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Scope

Testing is Critical to Disaster Recovery Planning

Cost of Disaster Recovery Backup Is High For Many Enterprises

Pandemic Alert Level 5 Requires DRP/BCP Plans be Activated

Disaster Planning for a Pandemic

How to get started with a Disaster Planning process

Google Designs its Servers With DRP and BCP in Mind

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity in a Mixed Vendor Environment

Facebook Disk Failure Results in Lost Data

Portable Disk Backup Device Released

Disaster and Business Continuity Preparedness

Disaster business continuity lessons learned

Do You Have Security Implemented for Your Disaster Plan

Are You Prepared for a Disaster?

Email Failure is a Disaster

Data Needs to be Protected When a DRP is Activated

Broadband to be Expanded by the Feds

How Should Data Be Backup for Disaster Recovery to Be Successful

Backup and Recovery Policy is Requried for an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Creating a Disaster Plan For Your Remote Offices

Backup Strategies for Disaster Recovery Plans

Budgeting Critical for Disaster and Business Continuity Planning

Network Communication Plan Is Part of the Disaster Plan

Formal Tested Backup Procedures Critical to Disaster Recovery

Elements of an Effective Disaster Prevention System

Enterprises Are More Sensitive to Outages

WiFi on Airlines Could Help Disaster Planning

Recovery management—what is it and why is it important?

Can Every Disaster Be Planned For?

Disaster Planning in a Recessions - Risks Faced

Disaster Planning Tips to Keep You Doors Open

After You Recover from a Disaster You Must Handle the Media

Many Disasters are Magnified by Human Error

Role of IT in a Disaster Defined

What Drives Disaster Recovery?

Change Control Needs to be Implemented for DRP and BCP to Work

Disk from space shuttle crash recovered

The Importance of a Business Resumption and Continuity Plan is Key to Disaster Planning

Mac Back-up released

Risk Taken by Not Shipping Backup Tapes Off-Site

How Do Mobile Workers Get Protected in a Disaster

The Magic of Creating a Disaster Plan - Data and Backup

During a recovery process what are the signs your staff is under stress

We have a Disaster Recovery Plan - But Will it Work?

Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity

Disaster Recovery versus Business Continuity

Whaling Security Attacks Have Can Put Your Disaster Recovery Plan at Risk

SSD - Solid State Drives are a great Disaster Planning Solution

Downtime Costs are High

Janco finds over one third of enterprises will lose significant revenue with one hour outage

Under Sea Cables Cut - Internet Service at Risk

The Cost of Business Continuity

Uptime the key issue that drives Disaster Planning

Firmware - one more issue to address in your disaster plan

FCC Requires Backup Power For Cell Sites

Erasing Files A Must For a Secure Environment

Emergency Power Off Can Cause Havoc During a Disaster

New Business Continuity Audit Program

Good DRP Lets IT Staff Act In Advance of Wildfires

Disaster Recovery Guide
Business Continuity Planning