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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 customer’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 “follow-the-sun” 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.

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.

After the fires the cellular network in Southern California was flooded. The same think occurred in Northern California after a minor earthquake last week. With so much dependence on the land based cellular network are enterprises at risk because they assume the network will be there and will be working.

Disasters are not just big events. A disaster can be an intermittent failure that continues over a several days, weeks, and even months which costs the enterprise in many ways including:

Enterprises are at risk as more of their operations are automated and placed on the Internet. Information Technology systems are vulnerable to a variety of disruptions, ranging from mild (e.g., short-term power outage, disk drive failure) to severe (e.g., equipment destruction, fire) from a variety of sources such as natural disasters to terrorists actions. While much vulnerability may be minimized or eliminated through technical, management, or operational solutions as part of the organizations risk management effort, it is virtually impossible to completely eliminate all risks.

One of the biggest challenges in creating a functional disaster recovery and business continuity plan is identifying and protecting essential elements of the enterprise. An effective plan must be departmentally broad, and consider the needs of the entire enterprise. The goal is to understand what is critical, and to encompass all of the necessary components (personnel, network, platforms, applications and data) when evaluating the process that support the critical functions of the enterprise. Good disaster recovery (DRP) and business continuity planning (BCP) needs to take a broad view, embracing people, human behavior, customers and other factors that lie outside the data center in the core operations of the enterprise. It is also imperative to secure the vision (and endorsement) of executive management.

There at least four reasons why Smart Phones are a must during any Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Process.

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.

Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template Now Accepted as the International Standard

It used to be easy to create a Disaster Recovery plan. You would back up your mainframe every evening or at least over the weekend and then ship the backu-up tapes off-site. Now you have to worry about much more.

(IT Business Edge) Are municipal wireless projects better positioned as primarily infrastructure to aid government and business or consumers and tourists? Of course, an existing network, no matter who it primarily serves on a normal day, can be put to good use in an emergency. We're not too sure how great the technical differences are between the two approaches. The point is that the distinction can be vital during the critical funding phase. It's instructive to examine the story of how the subsidiary of U.S. Internet that is working on Wireless Minneapolis pitched in when a bridge spanning the Mississippi collapsed. As the tragedy unfolded, the subsidiary disabled the network's paid log-in process, thus making connectivity freely available. Within hours, about six times the normal 1,000 paid users were on the system. - more info

Unforeseen events that disrupt business will happen. It's just a matter of time. Disasters impact everyone, but technology is usually burdened the most because it's your job to get the operation back up and running! So, you never want to get stuck without a plan.

(Computerworld) -- A power outage caused by an accident at a San Jose, Calif., data center blacked out the Cisco.com site for three hours today.

Cisco was able to communicate the problem over its official blog, but word about the cause came via e-mail from a spokeswoman at 5 p.m. EST.

We have traced the cause of the issue to an accident during maintenance of a San Jose data center that resulted in a power outage in that facility, the spokeswoman said. We would like to thank our customers and partners for their patience. We expect to resolve the issue shortly.

Users around the U.S. reported the outage sometime before 2 p.m. EST via various blogs, and then noted that service was restored about 4:50 p.m. EST.

Cisco did not describe the duration of the outage or exactly what happened and why a backup system was not available to quickly restore service, as would be common with a large Web site -- especially one run by the largest networking vendor in the world.

Bloggers questioned what was happening, and asked whether such a normally resilient site could have been attacked before they found out about the data center accident.

With all its mighty power, network behemoth's main website www.cisco.com is down, wrote slidersv at Slashdot. No news describing the reason as of now. I have tried accessing the site for the past hour, since our operations heavily rely on Cisco online documentation, with no luck. After all the advocacy of high-availability, security and performance.... Oh, the irony.

With expectations for system availability continually increasing and more businesses relying on 24 x 7 mission-critical applications, disaster recovery planning has risen to the forefront of IT's priorities. But complexities and costs associated with implementing a comprehensive data protection strategy often keep the vision from becoming reality, whether due to time, bandwidth and budget restraints.

(IDG News Service) -- SAN FRANCISCO -- A Web hosting company cited a faulty controller as the reason its backup electrical system failed during a San Francisco power outage last week, dousing the Web sites of several customers.

Service was interrupted to 40% of 365 Main Inc.'s customers when an electrical surge caused Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the local utility, to shut off power. Three of 10 backup generators failed to start at 365 Main, and the Web sites Craigslist.com, RedEnvelope.com, Yelp.com, Technorati.com and others went down for about 45 minutes.

365 Main traced the generator failures to a weakness in a controller in backup diesel generators. An incorrect setting on the device -- called a DDEC, for Detroit Diesel Electronic Controller -- was not allowing it to correctly reset its memory. Erroneous data left in the DDECs memory subsequently caused the diesel generators to misfire or fail to start, the company said.

365 Main corrected the settings on all the generators at its San Francisco data center and at another center it operates in El Segundo, Calif., because both use the same model of generators from Hitec Power Protection Ltd. Three other 365 Main data centers use other Hitec models.

The power outage resulted in 365 Main breaking the service-level agreements it has with its client Web sites. As a result, 365 Main said it will refund a portion of the monthly Web hosting fee that clients pay.

Continuing on it quest to be the most current Disaster Plan Template in the market, Janco has updated its DRP / Busniess Continuity Template for the second time this year. Janco contiues to update its templates to meet the ever changing requirements of the business environment.

Many organizations are struggling with the massive changes in data storage requirements that have transpired over the last decade. The almost exponential growth of business critical data from email, e-commerce, and electronic systems shows no sign of decreasing. With relatively new data types such as voice and video now in use, enterprise storage administrators will soon have to manage petabytes of data.

According to a recent study by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, the world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes and printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003 percent of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard-drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is becoming the universal medium for information storage. - more info

(Jeff Bardin - Blog) - The combination of a physical and cyber attack using our own infrastructure is inevitable. Attempts have already been made and continue to be made.

It is easy to appreciate the devastation of a physical attack and what it can bring because as Americans, we need to see things in order to understand them. But we must not underestimate the potentially devastating consequences of an electronic attack, especially when used in conjunction with or as a precursor to a physical attack. It may be just that cyber attack that enables the physical attack. Just like our combined sea, air and land battle plans, Â‘cyberÂ’ is a core component.

Our first responders depend upon our electronic infrastructure in order to respond to physical attacks. If we suffer a devastating blow to our electronic capabilities that stymies our efforts to respond to the corresponding physical attacks, and clogs the cyber arteries we depend upon, there will be a new 9/11 report asking why once more.

In April of this year, a former engineer at the nation's largest nuclear power plant (Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station outside Phoenix) was charged with taking computer access codes and software to Iran and using it to download details of plant control rooms and reactors. Using these codes could potentially combine the two (electronic/physical) for a massive loss of life and thousands of years of radiation contamination. Are you scared yet?

Information technology strikes are number two on Al QaedaÂ’s (pronounced Al-Qaw-ed-da) list for strikes at our economy.

How many of the 9/11 attackers were from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? How many study computer science and engineering in the US? Thousands! When living in Saudi, several organizations required students to attend the University of Tampa not far from the US Special Operations Command and Cincom and of course, return to the KSA. Those who were corrupted by the infidels in this country faced significant scrutiny and pressure. Some linked to the royals even faced a potential stint in the Â‘Rub Al-Khali or Empty Quarter. Regardless, the point is that when they return with their new found knowledge, they have no real job which turns to apathy, anger and attendance at the radicalized schools or as they are known in the West as madrasa (or school).

Electronic jihad sections of online jihadist sites host the cyber war information and gives up to the minute instructions or warnings of website penetration, suggestions for targets or timing of attacks, with detailed advice on the methods.

Just to ensure you have the proper level of paranoia and fear, there is a book and movie entitled Ameristan by Charles Welty. The major premise is that the United States of America becomes a conservative Muslim state where Islamic Sharia is the law of the land. You can even download it for a small fee.

Pakistanis harbor Usama bin Laden and the rest of terror incorporated while we prop up a Shah Reza Pahlavi type regime that already has nuclear weapons. General MusharrafÂ’s regime is on shaky ground. Pakistanis have since October 2001 attempted cyber jihad against the US. We all know what happened on Novermber 4, 1979 in Teheran, donÂ’t we.

What will you do when the day comes? What will I do for that matter when we are hit? Are you and your security and risk teams read for such activity? Is our critical infrastructure prepared for such a hit that is not only multi-vector but multi-faceted in its approach? Will we be prepared? Inshallah bukarah - more info

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