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British Oppose Disaster Planning Law
BBC: Environmental groups are campaigning against planning laws they claim will lead to "faceless bureaucrats" taking decisions on major projects. Opponents of the government's Planning Bill say it sweeps away local accountability for developments such as motorways and airports. Instead, they want people to have more say on the decisions that affect them.

The government says planning laws need reform to meet long-term challenges, such as those posed by climate change. The bill, currently going through Parliament, aims to replace the current system of holding a sometimes lengthy and expensive public inquiry each time a major infrastructure project is proposed, such as an airport or a power station.

Threre a a number of ways in which an enterpriser can add value in their disaster recovery capabilities. For example, storage vendors are enhancing their replication capabilities, tools for rapid recovery for databases and core applications like Exchange are finding their way into organizations of all sizes, and virtualization has opened new disaster recovery opportunities to a wide range of organizations.

Consider the Herculean efforts today to protect the network from threats: Intrusion prevention systems scan packets for potentially damaging content; email security systems check for viruses in email content and firewalls block unsolicited connections. To stop the onslaught of threats to corporate and government networks, a host of software and appliances are being deployed daily . In general, these border police applications are doing a fairly decent job of stopping unauthorized intrusion at the door to your network.

The global enterprise has a voracious appetite for data, and little patience for downtime. According to a recent Forrester report, 82 percent of larger IT organizations rated improving recovery time as a Â“criticalÂ” or Â“very criticalÂ” business priority. The need for continued focus and investment is clear, especially when you consider that data-at-rest in enterprises is growing at a compounded rate of 55 percent a year. Moving all that data is a mounting challenge, and business simply cannot wait.

Disaster plan need to take into account mainframes, blade servers as well as distributed file servers. The problem is more complex as enterprises slowly move away from IT and Business alignment towards IT and Business convergence. For example, 3mMainframes continue to hold their own against the onslaught of distributed server architectures, not because they are considered superior to newer technologies but because they still have a unique role to play in the enterprise. Recent market research indicates that 90 percent of mainframe users see the devices as long-term data hub and transaction server solutions fully suited to expected future workloads, particularly in SOA and Web services endeavors. Distributed servers, meanwhile, are likely to appeal to specialized shops with low MIPS requirements.

Virginia Tech Tragedy Leads Others to Establish Disaster Communication
(Computerworld) The deadly shootings of 32 people by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech one year ago on Wednesday galvanized college campuses nationwide, leading to a surge in new mass emergency communications purchases -- especially wireless text messaging technologies.

One of the best ways an IT professional can ensure effective data protection for his company is to first understand the trends and best practices of his peers. The pressures driving organizations to develop specific data protection strategies are unrelenting.

Is your confidential data safe and can it be recovered
Consider that the majority of your data, between 80 to 90 percent, resides on file servers. Now think about how you are controlling access to those shares. Most organizations find themselves with overly permissive access

controls. Employees join and leave the organization frequently, and roles, responsibilities and project teams change quickly as well. All this leads to more access permission granted than revoked, since it is nearly impossible to manually keep up with the changes. The result is that most folders on file shares are oversubscribed in terms of access by well over 70%. By fixing broken access control to your file servers, you can significantly reduce the probability of data misuse in your environment.

Any program to reduce the probability of data loss and misuse has to start with rightful and warranted access controls. Ensuring that only the right people can get to the right data at all times not only reduces the odds of misuse, it also makes any subsequent safeguards and loss prevention techniques more cost effective and pragmatic to deploy. Consider a folder containing confidential data. If it is open to everyone or to a large number of individuals then (1) anyone can access and misuse the data, and (2) access by everyone must be monitored and audited Â– which is not a realistic undertaking. Alternatively, limiting access to those who actually need the data, and reporting on their access patterns, is realistic and a practical way to ensure that data access permissions are not abused.

Tape versus Disk Backup

Most organizations use tape to back up data nightly. Tape is fairly inexpensive and low-tech, but managing and administering tape, backing up to tape and restoring files from it can be time consuming, unreliable and complex. Disk has always been an easier, more reliable alternative, but until recently its high acquisition cost has made it untouchable for many organizations. Fortunately, new disk and data reduction technologies have recently converged to make disk-based backup available at about the same price of tape backup systems.

Business and market changes of the new global economy coupled with the explosion of digital media have made obsolete the traditional methods of tape backup/restore for corporate disaster recovery (DR). Advances in business continuity technologies, heavier reliance on information technology (IT) systems to meet competitive e-commerce needs, and regulatory legislation are forcing top executives to reformulate their DR solutions. DR planning is not insurmountable, however. Organizations can utilize new standards, methodologies, services, and technologies to create viable DR and business continuity solutions at marginal cost.

Vista SP1 is already available to subscribers to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) but will not receive a formal public release until mid-March. Two weeks ago,

Microsoft published a list of programs that would experience reduced functionality, or not work at all, after the installation of SP1. Microsoft customers have also been complaining that the update has upset the functionality on their machines.

Successful Disk-to-Disk (D2D) Backup of an organizations data is its lifeblood, and protecting that data is a strategic activity for information technology professionals.

(eWeek) Disaster recovery, security, business application services and hosted infrastructure topped CIOs' most-wanted lists. Disaster recovery and business

continuity topped the list of CIOs' must-haves, while business application services and hosted/outsourced infrastructure rounded out the top of the list, compiled from Channel Insider research.

They do not like to be called radio cops. They insist on being called frequency coordinators. But on rare occasions at National Football League games, the NFLs Game Day Frequency Coordinators have to get a bit insistent.

A surprising 19 percent of organizations have no plan whatsoever for assuring business continuity, with these enterprises most often blaming cost as the key barrier. But the biggest slice of organizations (40

percent) spends less than $100,000 per year on their BC initiatives. This suggests that organizations who look at cost as a primary barrier to developing a BC plan should revisit the actual costs in relation to their business risk. It is Janco experience that when actual risks are analyzed and dollar values are attached to these risks, companies find it very simple to cost justify the implementation of a BC plan.

Centralized Data Backup

The need to be close to customers, manufacturing facilities and specialized labor have required organizations to extend the traditional concept of headquarters to offices and factories hundreds or even thousands of miles away. However, along with the opportunities that come with workforce globalization, come the realities of dealing with data that sprawls across the organization. Whether the data is at the Munich branch or at HQ in New York, it is equally susceptible to loss, requiring that data recovery and security plans apply to all parts of the organization, regardless of location.

To protect company data and ensure its availability to users, IT organizations have been conflicted between two backup approaches. The first approach, local tape backup, requires that tape libraries be present wherever there are servers in racks. Local area network (LAN) access to the servers gives administrators fast data backup and recovery. The newer approach, centralized backup, puts high-density tape libraries in one location to which data from servers around the world is backed up. While centralized backup requires less hardware, reduces administration time, and solves the security problem associated with loose tape media, it can introduce greater bandwidth consumption and longer backup/restore windows.

Disaster Planning and Down Time Planning
There is an increase in the number of companies and organizations requiring 24 x 365 days of IT uptime. In fact, research indicates that 36% of enterprises indicate they will incur significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact if they have even an hour or less of downtime on their mission-critical applications.

Almost 15% indicate they cannot tolerate any downtime. More and more organizations of all sizes now require applications to be running and data to be always available. The needs of these organizations go far beyond simply recovery, requiring an environment that maintains business continuity during and immediately after a disaster. To make it more interesting, the number and types of applications that require this level of protection is very diverse.

In fact, in the enterprise space 14% of the businesses polled said they cannot tolerate any application downtime. More than 58% cannot tolerate four hours or less of application downtime. All told, more than 80% of Enterprise-class and mid-tier respondents reported that they cannot tolerate more than 24 hours of application unavailability2. What is even more interesting is that survey respondents were not just from the
Financial Sector but also included Government, Manufacturing, Retail and Health Care (including Pharmaceutical). Some of the reasons for these survey results include the following:

Retail: The critical applications that track point-of-sales data and enable inventory and distribution require applications that are always available. Being able to react quickly to changing conditions can mean the difference between profitability and loss. Online shopping and the customerÂ’s experience are also very important to retailers, and downtime is not acceptable.
Health Care: With the digitization of medical images and patient records, retaining and ensuring availability of these applications and files is beyond mission-critical. Especially when you consider the pervasive use of technology in the operating room, effectiveness can actually be measured in the number of lives, not just dollars, saved.
Manufacturing: Competitive pressures drive companies to run as efficiently as possible. Just-in-time manufacturing processes that coordinate shipments from suppliers around the world demand 24 x 7 availability.
Globalization: Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on a global economy. Many have established key technology in Â“follow-the-sunÂ” modes that require 24 x 7 availability.
Increased sensitivity to outages: Business continuity is now a boardroom-level concern. In many cases, it is the CEO who mandates that the business be fully protected. Even worse than an outage itself is the fallout from negative press, loss of customer confidence and, for public companies, potential impact to stock prices.

Regardless of the industry, the trend is clear: more businesses require highly available solutions. Not only is this expanding along industry lines, but we also see mid-tier companies requiring disaster tolerant solutions.

(NetworkWorld) Data center consolidation is all the rage, enterprises are taking geographically distributed data centers and collapsing them into one or two centrally managed locations that are less expensive and easier to operate.

Internet-based storage has traditionally been the domain of smaller start-ups or directly associated with targeted services (e.g. photo sharing, online backup, etc.). But it's now drawing the interest of larger companies as well, most notably Microsoft, which has public betas under way for two interesting services. SkyDrive provides online file storage (public, private and shared folders, with drag-and-drop capability) and a (currently) unrelated service, FolderShare, offers controlled peer-to-peer file synchronization. While most of these services are presently targeted at individual users, it is not much of a stretch to envision future business-focused offerings.

One major hurdle to business acceptance of such services is, of course, the degree of willingness to store corporate data externally. There is already some precedence for this in the growing adoption of SaaS-based applications, where data is housed externally, often in common databases. Another more unusual, but apparently effective, example of Internet storage usage is The New York Times' decision to house in PDF format 11 million articles written between 1851 and 1980, using Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service.

So, how does a generic file storage service differ from these other models? The unstructured, multipurpose nature of file data inherently provokes more concerns about security. Already, there are significant corporate concerns about data leakage via physical devices (such as USB drives and iPods), as well as through online methods (such as private e-mail accounts). A Web-based document folder where a user can drag and drop pretty much any file is subject to far less control than, say, interacting with and storing data through a SaaS-based application. The lack of centralized policy management and monitoring for Internet-based storage becomes a major inhibitor.

At its core, this issue reflects a fundamental shortcoming of the traditional file-server model. Corporate file servers ultimately become repositories (or perhaps receptacles) for all sorts of data, both high-value and low. Data classification assessments have regularly demonstrated that a surprising amount of sensitive information can unexpectedly turn up in all sorts of places within shared file directories. The fact that this information is buried in a server within corporate boundaries is one thing, but sitting somewhere out in cyberspace is quite another.

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