(Computerworld) — Like many other organizations, the Baltimore Ravens took note of what happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina last year and decided to take steps to prevent a similar occurrence, said the senior director of IT at the American Football Conference team. The professional sports team had been backing its data up to tape, but it moved to a combination hardware, software and service offering from AmeriVault Corp., he said. The National Football League Inc. organization, which had about 200GB of stored data, started out with a 500GB system at AmeriVault and took an initial snapshot which took about a day and then shipped it to Waltham, Mass., to be loaded into the AmeriVault data centers. It was then shipped back to Baltimore, and every night, any files that were changed during the day get backed up to the Massachusetts facility. The data is also mirrored to a facility in Illinois.

Chinese government allocates 120 million yuan for disaster recovery
China’s central government has allocated 120 million yuan (15.2 million U.S. dollars) to regions struck by recent severe natural disasters, said the Ministry of Finance. Half will be allocated to areas struck by a severe drought in Sichuan and other regions in southwest China and half will be used for disaster recovery operations related to typhoon Saomai. Source: Xinhua

DRP for Web Sites
Janco Associates, Inc. (Janco), announced today the release of Version 4.1 of its disaster Recovery and business Continuity Template. This electronic document is over 183 pages and can be used in the creation of a unique disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) and business Continuity plan (BCP) for any entity. In the process of creating DRPs and BCPs for organizations across the country, Janco has found every department, in every corporation or organization needs a universal, yet comprehensive DRP and BCP to safeguard the use of their computers and all related equipment and information which support enterprise wide operations in the event of a disaster. Version 4.1 has detail activation procedures for the plan as well as a specific form set for web site that are informational and e-commerce based.

How minimize your backup exposure
Are you taking the right steps, or could you reduce your backup window further? Are you setting the right data protection goals? Have you established the best benchmarks? How can you optimize your backup model to meet your SLA s? Have you projected your data growth accurately? Will your technology fit all your needs? To accomplish this you should: Set data protection goals based on buisness needs Establish performance benchmarks Optimize backup performance to exceed your benchmarks Forecast the capacity needs for both hardware and software Build a modular data protection architecture      

Sri Lanka: Responsibility and Burma
ICT4Peace on the idea of international responsibility and citizen-centered disaster response in the context of the humanitarian crisis in Burma.

What Telephone Service Will You Have After the disaster
The telephone industry is facing a very interesting quandary. On one hand, all-fiber builds offer elegant solutions and robust triple- and quadruple-play possibilities. Verizon clearly is opting for this approach. However, a good deal of money can be made by leveraging existing copper, though the resulting service platforms are more limited. AT&T is mixing its approach. The company released interesting results about its U-Verse fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) deployment at the Merrill Lynch Communications Services Forum this week. The company expects weekly customer additions to increase from 12,000 to 40,000 by the end of the week. That wasn’t the only number of note. John Stankey, the president of the company’s telecom operations said 60 percent of the new video customers are coming from cable operators, a percentage that exceeds expectations.

What is a Chief Security Officer - the CSO Who is it?
What is the Chief Security Officer (CSO)?  The title Chief Security Officer (CSO) was first used inside the information technology department and function to identify the person responsible for IT security. At many enterprises, the term CSO is still used in this way. The CSO title is also used in many enterprises to describe the leader of the “corporate security” function, which includes the physical security and safety of employees, facilities and assets. This individual often holds a title such as Vice President or Director of Corporate Security. Historically, corporate security and information security have been handled by separate departments. The CSO is the executive responsible for the organization’s entire security posture, both physical and digital. CSOs also frequently own or participate closely in related areas such as business continuity planning, loss prevention and fraud prevention, and privacy. At a tactical level, technology is being infused into physical security tools, which are increasingly database-driven and network-delivered. At a strategic level, CEOs and corporate boards, motivated in part by regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, and ISO 27000 (formerly ISO 17799) 27001 & 27002 standards, desire an enterprise-wide view of operational risk. The Chief Security Officer (CSO) is responsible for overall direction of all security functions associated with Information Technology applications, communications (voice and data), and computing services within the enterprise.  At the same time the CSO must be aware of the implications of legislated requirements that impact security for the enterprise.  This includes but is not limited to Sarbanes Oxley Section 404 requirements. The CSO has the responsibility for global and enterprise-wide information security; he/she is also responsible for the physical security, protection services and privacy of the corporation and its employees.

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.