Disaster Recovery

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on TheWHIR – Why Does It Seem Like Airline Computers Are Crashing More?
13
Feb 17

TheWHIR – Why Does It Seem Like Airline Computers Are Crashing More?

Another week, another major airline is crippled by some kind of software glitch.

If you feel as if you’re hearing about these incidents more often, you are—but not necessarily because they’re happening more frequently.

Delta Air Lines Inc. suffered an IT outage that led to widespread delays and 280 flight cancellations on Jan. 29 and 30, a problem the carrier said was caused by an electrical malfunction. A week earlier, United Continental Holdings Inc. issued a 2 1/2-hour ground stop for all its domestic flights following troubles with a communication system pilots use to receive data.

These two shutdowns were the latest in what’s been a series of computer crack-ups over the past few years, including major system blackouts that hobbled Southwest Airlines Co. as well as Delta for several days last summer—affecting tens of thousands of passengers.

More of the WHIR post from Bloomberg

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on CIO Insight – Deep Insecurities: Things Just Keep Getting Worse
09
Feb 17

CIO Insight – Deep Insecurities: Things Just Keep Getting Worse

Ninety-three percent of companies’ security operation centers admit they’re not keeping up with the volume of threat alerts and incidents, putting them at risk.

Cyber-threats
Despite a growing focus on cyber-security—along with gobs of money and staff time thrown at the task—things just seem to get worse. According to a December 2016 report from McAfee Labs, 93 percent of organizations’ security operation centers admit that they are not keeping up with the volume of threat alerts and incidents, putting them at significant risk of moderate to severe breaches.

Altogether, 67 percent of the survey respondents (more than 400 security practitioners spanning multiple countries, industries and company sizes) reported an increase in security breaches. Yet, on average, organizations are unable to sufficiently investigate 25 percent of security alerts.

More of the CIO Insight article from Samuel Greengard

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy — Comments Off on ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: technology systems to test DR
13
Jan 17

ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: technology systems to test DR

In this concluding part of a two-part series, Computer Weekly looks at ways of testing disaster recovery (DR). In the first article, we discussed the need for disaster recovery and for developing a strategy to test the backup process.

We discussed four main items that need to be evaluated to ensure successful testing. These were:

Time – Evaluating the time since a test was last performed and measuring the time to complete recovery, from a RTO (recovery time objective) perspective.
Change – Testing after major changes occur in the infrastructure, such as application upgrades or infrastructure (hypervisor changes).
Impact – What is the impact of running a test? Can a test be run without impacting the production environment?
People – How do we consider the human factor from the perspective of taking human error out of the recovery process?

In a virtual environment, the options for recovery can be divided into four main sections.

More of the ComputerWeekly article from Chris Evans

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Strategy / Uncategorized — Comments Off on ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan
12
Jan 17

ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan

IT has become critical to the operation of almost every company that offers goods and services to businesses and consumers.

We all depend on email to communicate, collaboration software (such as Microsoft Word and Excel) for our documents and data, plus a range of applications that manage internal operations and customer-facing platforms such as websites and mobile apps.

Disaster recovery – which describes the continuing of operations when a major IT problem hits – is a key business IT processes that has to be implemented in every organisation.

First of all, let’s put in perspective the impact of not doing effective disaster recovery.

Estimates on the cost of application and IT outages vary widely, with some figures quoting around $9000/minute.

More of the ComputerWeekly article from Chris Evans

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Survey finds that US companies are struggling with remote and branch office IT disaster recovery
05
Jan 17

Continuity Central – Survey finds that US companies are struggling with remote and branch office IT disaster recovery

Riverbed Technology has published the results of a survey that looks at the challenges that organizations are facing when managing IT at remote and branch offices. The survey asked IT professionals about the various challenges they face in provisioning and managing remote and branch offices (ROBOs) and found supporting ‘the IT edge’ was expensive, resource-intensive and full of potential data security risks.

ROBO IT continues to be provisioned and managed largely as it has been for the past 20 years, with distributed IT spread out across potentially hundreds of remote and branch locations. However, this approach can bring data risk and operational penalties to companies at an extremely high cost, and in today’s increasingly distributed enterprise with a primary focus on data and security, past approaches may not be ideal for business success. Given the various challenges associated with managing remote sites, organizations have their hands full in supporting the edge.

More of the Continuity Central post

Business continuity / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – The rise of SIP-based cyber attacks
14
Dec 16

Continuity Central – The rise of SIP-based cyber attacks

Cyber attacks using the VoIP protocol Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) have been growing in 2016, accounting for over 51 percent of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) security event activity analysed in the last 12 months, according to a new report from IBM’s Security Intelligence group.

“SIP is one of the most commonly used application layer protocols in VoIP technology, so it’s not surprising that it’s the most targeted. In fact, we found that there has been an upward trend in attacks targeting the SIP protocol, with the most notable uptick occurring in the second half of 2016,” states the IBM Security Intelligence group.

The second most targeted protocol, Cisco’s proprietary Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP), accounted for just over 48 percent of detected security events during the same time period.

More of the Continuity Central post

Business continuity / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – C-Level and IT pros disagree on organizations’ ability to recover from a disaster: Evolve IP survey
09
Dec 16

Continuity Central – C-Level and IT pros disagree on organizations’ ability to recover from a disaster: Evolve IP survey

When it comes to assessing an organization’s ability to recover from a disaster, a significant disconnect exists between C-Level executives and IT professionals. While nearly 7 in 10 CEOs, CFOs or COOs feel their organization is very prepared to recover from a disaster, less than half of IT pros (44.5 percent) are as confident , a technology survey conducted by Evolve IP reports. The survey of more than 500 executives and IT professionals uncovered factors, including compliance requirements and use of hosted solutions, that contribute to an organization’s disaster recovery confidence overall.

Disaster recovery compliance was a clear driver of confidence in the ability to recover IT and related assets in the event of an incident. In fact, 67 percent of respondents in banking, 58 percent of respondents in the government sector and 55 percent of respondents at technology companies feel very prepared: of these disaster recovery compliance was noted as a requirement by 97 percent, 73.5 percent and 71 percent respectively.

More of the Continuity Central post

CIO Strategy / Cloud Computing / Cloud infrastructure / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IaaS / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Baseline – Why IT Pros Feel Unprepared for Disasters
07
Dec 16

Baseline – Why IT Pros Feel Unprepared for Disasters

While most C-level executives feel their organization is “very prepared” for a potential systems-crashing disaster, IT professionals sharply disagree, according to a recent survey from Evolve IP. The “2016 Evolve IP Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Survey” report indicates that a significant number of companies have suffered from a major incident that required disaster recovery (DR) over the past year—sometimes resulting in six-figure losses. Many tech employees indicate that a lack of DR budgeting leaves them unprepared for disruptions caused by hardware failures, server issues, power outages, environmental events, human error and targeted cyber-attacks. And a great many organizations still rely on old-school recovery methods such as backup tapes, instead of newer cloud-based solutions.

There is, however, notable interest in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), despite the fact that only about half of C-level executives have heard of this term. “The lack of DR education at the executive level—and the likely related lack of budget—poses a real risk to today’s businesses,” according to the report. “These factors are further exacerbated by a dramatic increase in targeted attacks, continued reliance on aging tape backups, as well as internal hardware that remains highly susceptible to failure.

More of the Baseline slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / Data Center / Disaster Recovery / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan
30
Nov 16

ComputerWeekly – Disaster recovery testing: A vital part of the DR plan

Disaster recovery provision is worthless unless you test out your plans. In this two-part series, Computer Weekly looks at disaster recovery testing in virtualised datacentres

IT has become critical to the operation of almost every company that offers goods and services to businesses and consumers.

We all depend on email to communicate, collaboration software (such as Microsoft Word and Excel) for our documents and data, plus a range of applications that manage internal operations and customer-facing platforms such as websites and mobile apps.

Disaster recovery – which describes the continuing of operations when a major IT problem hits – is a key business IT processes that has to be implemented in every organisation.

First of all, let’s put in perspective the impact of not doing effective disaster recovery.

Estimates on the cost of application and IT outages vary widely, with some figures quoting around $9000/minute.es and mobile apps.

More of the ComputerWeekly post from Chris Evans

Business continuity / CIO Strategy / Disaster Recovery / IT Governance / IT Security / IT Strategy — Comments Off on Continuity Central – Maintenance of a business continuity management system: a managerial approach
28
Oct 16

Continuity Central – Maintenance of a business continuity management system: a managerial approach

Practical approach to achieving the difficult task of keeping your business continuity plans up to date.

When a business continuity management system (BCMS) has been established and implemented, a serious managerial challenge evolves: the BCMS has to be maintained and put into a continuous improvement process. In this article, Alberto Alexander. Ph.D, MBCI, looks at the activities that need to be performed to maintain and improve a BCMS.

INTRODUCTION

Any organization that establishes and implements a BCMS needs to follow the BCMS processes and deliverables, which are depicted in figure one. The BCMS processes, also known as the BCMS process life cycle model, (Alexander, 2009), consist of six phases.

The stages of the BCMS process life cycle model are the following:

Stage one: business impact analysis
The business impact analysis (BIA), which is conducted during the first stage, analyzes the financial and operational impact of disruptive events on the business areas and processes of an organization. The financial impact refers to monetary losses such as lost sales, lost funding, and contractual penalties. Operational impact represents non–monetary losses related to business operations, and can include loss of competitive edge, damage to investor confidence, poor customer service, low staff morale, and damage to business reputation.

More of the Continuity Central article

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