Christopher Alvord, Frank Shultz
www.contingencyplanning.com
The implementation of large scale Business Continuity Management (BCM) software projects is fundamentally different than with smaller installations. This article explores why these programs often fall short of their objectives. After reviewing senior management needs, three basic principles are defined to ensure effective deployment and project success: design should allow for central views and controls, while allowing decentralized planning, localization and integration of live sources of data; deployment methods should avoid dangerous “Big Bang” project risks, instead of planning for incremental production use as needed across …

www.contingencyplanning.com
Nir Illaani

Natural disasters – such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes and blizzards – are liable to wreak havoc upon data center operations, causing service and network outages. Although typically unexpected, the question is unfortunately when rather than ifsuch extraordinary events will occur. Still, their effects can be contained by preparing for the inevitable aftermath.
“Hope for the best – expect the worst”
With the possibility of natural disasters and weather-related strikes at any time, there is the possibility that these events produce tremendous consequences to major companies, including the loss of power, power …

Mark Townsend
Soure: Disaster Recovery Journal
If your company is like  most organizations, virtualization has become a fact in your data center. Also, it is transforming many aspects of the data center, resulting in better system utilization, application availability, and cost savings in hardware and energy use. For these reasons and others, virtualization technologies are being deployed to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of data center resources.
Although virtualization tops most priority lists for enterprises in 2010, the technology also presents challenges in terms of managing a dynamic environment. One of the greatest obstacles …

Author: John Jackson and Dan Dec
continuityinsights.com
Let’s explore one of the recovery strategies most often employed in the recovery solution process: the work-from-home option. Through my involvement with hundreds of enterprise organizations, it is clear that the work- from-home recovery strategy has increased in popularity over the years. There are a number of reasons for that. It is relatively inexpensive for organizations already deploying laptops to employees. It provides fairly high flexibility at an individual level. And, as a recovery solution, it is easily understood by executive decision makers.
However, this option …

-Homeland Security Newswire-
Energetic and acquisitive U.K. VAR Onyx refreshes DRS proposition after recent buy-out and aims for more consolidation; company claims that many disaster recovery packages do not cater effectively for smaller firms, particularly in London
Acquisitive VAR Onyx Group is targeting more buy-outs in the business continuity arena after rolling out its SME-focused disaster recovery offering.
CRN’s Sam Trendall writes that in October, Onyx bought London-based Disaster Recovery Solutions (DRS) in a deal which gave it eighty workplace recovery sites across the United Kingdom — forty of those in the capital. It …

–nyt.com–
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: March 1, 2010

The Obama administration on Tuesday plans to declassify portions of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, created during the Bush administration as a secret effort to harness the nation’s defensive and offensive strategies for protecting commercial and government networks.

The announcement is to be made by Howard A. Schmidt, the industry cybersecurity veteran who was appointed in December as the White House Internet security adviser, at an industry convention in San Francisco.

The declassification effort, which will not include the entire directive, will be focused on showing that …

–By Alice Lipowicz–
–gcn.com–
Mar 15, 2010
 
Homeland Security Department has not reviewed $160M in expenditures, audit reveals
Homeland Security Department officials haven’t reviewed invoices for more than $160 million in spending related to DHS’ primary data center operating on Navy property, DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner contends in a new report.
Also, DHS is paying too much rent to the Navy and has failed to include major elements in its interagency agreement, such as how much space it is renting and what percentage of shared costs it will absorb, according to the March 12 …

–By Megan Kellett, Assistant Site Editor of SearchDisasterRecovery.com–
According to a recent study by New York-based Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) Research, Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery, the global business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) market is predicted to grow from $24.3 billion in 2009 to more than $39 billion in 2015. The study has been observing the market trends for business continuity and disaster recovery since 2004, and covers BC and DR in hardware and software services, as well as trends in both enterprise and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Reasons for such …

-Ian Grant-
The snow storm that brought London transport to a standstill, stopped one in five from getting to work, and cost upwards of £1bn, was expected.
The Met Office warned a week earlier that it expected heavy snowfalls. No one anticipated the havoc it would cause, even though severe weather is the fifth-biggest risk in the National Risk Register (see box).
As the snow stalled transport, websites for transport firms collapsed under service demands that amounted to a distributed denial of service attack. The National Rail website took six times its normal …

–hstoday.com—-by Mickey McCarter  –

 TSA faces challenges with card reader pilot also, GAO says The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the US Coast Guard must develop a disaster recovery plan to ensure smooth operation of their biometric identification card system for transportation workers, congressional investigators said Thursday.
The agencies also must work through some challenges with implementing card readers for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) at seaports, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report Transportation Worker Identification Credential: Progress Made in Enrolling Workers and Activating Credentials but Evaluation Plan Needed …