More stringent regulations on the retention of email and other types of data will compel companies to revisit their data retention policies and strategies in 2008-as well as focusing on tune-up measures for their disaster recovery and business continuation plans.

While many enterprises invested in and upgraded DR plans in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, many have also stopped there. In spite of this, the Aberdeen Group reported in September 2007 that 80% of best-in-class companies planned to make continuous improvement and investment in data
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Just this past week, less than a year after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, disaster again struck in the form of a gunman at Northern Illinois University. Such situations are sadly part of the concerns today for any contingency planner in virtually
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In a world of rapidly evolving technology solutions, IT environments in organizations are becoming more complex and playing a larger role in every aspect of daily business operations. No longer can organizations afford to use vendors as only an IT provider and not an integral part of an organization's IT support team. To avoid costly inefficiencies, businesses need to utilize advanced technical support services to manage growingly complex IT environments, augment the return on IT investments, and defend against increasingly sophisticated and targeted security threats.  read more »

For years, many of you have seen my Business Resumption Planning articles in NaSPA's publications.  The focus has almost always been on the Fortune 1000 enterprise, and more specifically on the U.S. Fortune 1000 enterprise.  I have on occasion, however, addressed the public and or socioeconomic side of Disaster Recovery Planning, either as a former Mayor and City Councilman or telecom expert.  (Relax on the Mayor thing, I'm ‘better' now...)    read more »

In days of yore, disaster recovery (DR) meant offsite backup tapes. But when it came time to restore that data, some companies found it could take days, weeks or even an eternity to recover the systems - in the common event that tape backups proved incomplete or faulty.

Enter a wide range of snapshot, replication, mirroring and disk-based backup technologies to speed the time required for recovery as expressed in what is known as recovery time objective (RTO) i.e. how long it would take to have systems back up and running.  read more »

Disaster recovery (DR) can be really expensive these days. Think about having a mirror site at a remote location. Every single server, disk array, SAN fabric component, and networking box is duplicated at the DR facility. Expensive replication technology is used to write data simultaneously at both sites - and that takes an awful lot of high-priced bandwidth. Pretty soon, the budget has skyrocketed and plans have to be pared down.  read more »

Some of you may recall about a year ago, I introduced a new concept-the Disaster Recovery cheat sheet.  Think of it as "fast food" for your recovery plan.  The cheat sheet is intended to be a quick guide to some fast and inexpensive changes, updates or modifications you can make to your recovery plan in order to make it more resilient.   read more »

Introduction

Enterprise Content Management applications offer companies the ability to do far more than create, manage and share unstructured content (including documents, web content, video and scanned images), which was one of the original selling points for the technology. The real benefits- improved organizational collaboration, workflow, operational continuity and increased productivity - go well beyond the limits of document management to include support for a growing number of applications that contain a range of structured and unstructured data.  read more »

Last month we discussed the advantages of satellite communications in a disaster, most notably for the "4Ci" aspects of Disaster Recovery (Command, Control, Communications, Computers and intelligence) as well as for restoring communications to and from your customers.
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A few months ago we touched on satellite communications in an article on wireless communications. Given the recent rash of "mega disasters" however, when for all practical purposes the communications infrastructure in the affected area ceases to exist, a refresher of this technology is in order.  read more »

Last month in Part I of this two part series we left off by explaining how Command and Control is of utmost importance throughout the first alert process. It is during this critical time immediately following a catastrophic event that rapid and often irreversible decisions are made.
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Hurricane Katrina is still a recent memory for most of us-and enterprises have taken stock of lessons learned, applying them to "bullet-proofing" their disaster recovery plans.  read more »

The Importance of Implementing a Disaster Recovery Plan for Messaging  read more »

Most sizable organizations have some type of Business Resumption Plan in place designed to respond to a disaster in an equipment room or other facility. A disaster, for purposes of this article, is loosely defined as an incident which damages the facility, equipment, or data, which supports a “mission  read more »