Swine Flu - DRP - BCP - CIO Issue
What swine flu has done is reminded us all of the necessity to plan for threat scenarios that affect people more than they do data centers and other physical corporate facilities. Alternate work area facilities, mobile recovery units, and other workforce recovery strategies are not effective when people are home sick or there are travel bans in place. In these scenarios, your workforce recovery strategy must rely on remote access solutions or virtual workforce solutions. Large numbers of employees out sick will affect the business (revenue) and cost your company a lot of money in productivity loss (you still pay employees their salary when they are out). In a recent Janco Associates survey, they asked over 300 DRP/BCP decision makers if their company had strategies for workforce recovery in their BCPs, 71% said yes. This means that 29% of you out there have a lot of work to do. Of the 71% that have strategies in place, 82% use remote access procedures as part of their strategy. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has confirmed thousands of cases of swine flu in the United States and as other countries including Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Israel, Spain, and all of Europe has confirmed cases. This means health officials have confirmed that the disease can spread person-to-person and has the potential to cause “community-level” outbreaks. IT disaster recovery is not necessarily business continuity. In addition there is a good chance that the plan is out of date and that it has not been exercised in a long time. A plan walk through is no substitute for a more thorough exercise but it is a good place to start. Validate the currency of the plan and the procedures. Validate team member, roles, and responsibilities. Understand what technology and services you currently have in place.
Disaster Recovery Centers: Second Center To Open In Worcester County, Norfolk County Center Relocates
ANDOVER, Mass. — A Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) will open on Monday, April 12 in Clinton to assist Worcester County individuals, households and businesses with disaster-related damage caused by mid-March record rainfall and resulting flooding in Eastern and Central Massachusetts.
Budget cuts impact disaster plans
IT staff cuts spurred by the economy are likely to continue throughout the remainder of the year. According to a survey of 300 IT center managers last year, half of all data centers were planning to cut 2010 budgets by an average of 15%. Respondents at 14% of those companies said the cuts would include layoffs of IT staffers. The PayPal electronic payment system is one of many Internet-based services that have been hit with outages. And based on news reports, the number of such incidents appears to have been increasing in recent months, analysts said. They cited shutdowns of the Google Apps software hosted by Google Inc., outages at data centers run by Rackspace Hosting Inc. and a distributed denial-of-service attack on Twitter. Observers pointed to several possible reasons for the apparent uptick in online outages, including IT budget and personnel cutbacks, increasing corporate dependence on hosted applications — and bad luck. Companies are not doing the maintenance we should be doing, and when you do not do maintenance, they increase the probability of catastrophic failure.
