(COMPUTERWORLD) - Every hour that the storage network is down costs Fidelity National Financial Inc. almost $4 million. And that is just the direct cost. The opportunity cost at the provider of real estate services is incalculable, Amble, director of IT at the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company, said last week. Fidelity National Financial insures almost one in three real estate titles nationwide.

Vista Automatic Re-boots Adds Complexity to disaster Recovery
In the Vista environment disaster plan need to take into account security and the automatic reboot processes.  No longer is the user in control of what happens when and wither it can be postponed.  Image the situation where you have to get a mission critical system back in operation and you restore point is before the last one of these automatic updates. The problem is more complex as enterprises slowly move away from IT and business alignment towards IT and business convergence.  Today, with the dependence of business operations on Information Technology and the slow acceptance of Vista as the operating system of choice this will become a more critical problem. Appropriately disaster Recovery and business Continuity need to be updated to reflect this new dependence.

RFID chips will eventually be combined with GPS technology
(Computerworld) —  Imation Corp. today announced a first-of-its-kind tracking technology that could put an end to the ongoing problem of lost data tapes by using passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking systems to remotely locate cartridges, no matter where they are — stationary or in transit. Imation said it will begin shipping its RFID tape-tracking technology in April. The technology embeds RFID chips in standard tape-cartridge labels, allowing them to be scanned either individually with a handheld device or by placing cases with up to 20 tapes inside on a scanning pad. While the GPS tracking system will not be part of the initial product launch next month, over the next two months, Imation plans to announce when GPS technology will be available in order to locate cartridges no matter where they are.

ITSM Policy Templated Updated
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.

What is the total cost of a world class disaster Plan?
business continuance and disaster recovery always sound great, that is, until management takes a look at the dollars involved. While it can be somewhat easy to justify the costs involved in providing complete duplication of a few key mission critical servers and applications, it becomes much more difficult to justify the next tier of applications requiring duplicate hardware for disaster recovery protection. The first step the company took when it was formulating its plan was to calculate potential dollars lost. If a natural or manmade disaster prevented it from shipping equipment its customers, the disaster would cost the company about $xx millions a day. That potential loss was then weighed against the $500,000 a year it costs to use disaster recovery services.