You might need to think about giving an infected person's immediate co-workers enhanced sick leave to protect themselves or family members, particularly if they have particular medical vulnerability to the illness, he says. Some employers bring in cleaning crews to disinfect an office where swine flu has been found. Providing hand disinfectant for employees is not a bad idea.

Microsoft officials still have not provided many details about what caused the outage, other than to say it was a core system failure. The failure is unrelated to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and/or Microsoft's Azure datacenters, as the company has continued to run the Sidekick back-end on the same infrastructure it has been running on before Microsoft acquired the company in 2008.

The Microsoft/Danger team apologized for the amount of time they are taking to restore contacts, photos, e-mail and other Sidekick services to which users lost access at the start of the month. The team said they were taking their time "to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data."

The team still is not committing to an exact recovery timetable, but is saying restoration should begin this week. Microsoft said, "We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter."

After telling users that they likely had lost all of their personal data, the Microsoft/Danger team then said they expected to be able to recover some of their data. Mid-weeklast week, they said they expected to recover "most if not all" of the missing user data.

What is a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events - whether those event might include a hurricane or simply a power outage caused by a backhoe in the parking lot. The CIO's involvement in this process can range from overseeing the plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency.

Sidekick failed and lost user data.  On the face of it, there are some obvious lessons to be learned from the Sidekick snafu, even as Microsoft Corp. reported today that most of the data that was missing will be recovered from servers at its Danger Inc. subsidiary.

The lessons learned are:

• Back up your mobile phone's critical data independently - on a laptop, a desktop or a thumb drive.
• Raise questions about cloud computing and related services.
• Find out how your mobile device stores data, and make sure you understand it.
   
  The Sidekick incident should serve as a reminder to users to back up critical data. You cannot rely on cloud services to be 100% available all the time.

Not only is a backup of critical data imperative, users need to have a way to retrieve the backed-up data. CIOs need to think about the value of the data and what happens if the service is not available. There are many Internet-based services that can be a second backup version to the original backup, such as Plaxo. Having the second one drastically reduces the odds of total loss.

At larger companies, data backups are commonplace and often include information contained on wireless phones as well as desktop computers, analysts said. The issue becomes more difficult when IT shops trust users who put critical company data on personally-owned wireless phones that aren't backed up.

Despite urging users to back up critical data, Staten joined three other analysts in remaining faithful to the mobile phone industry's strong push for cloud computing services, noting that the Sidekick case was relatively isolated.

Nearly every major smartphone provider is working on some version of cloud computing to back up data from smartphones and other cell phones. All those services could be vulnerable to data loss, and the Sidekick example is likely to prompt a broad re-examination of internal server backup procedures.

One added is risk is that backend services open enterprisees up to having data potentially lost, stolen or replicated somewhere that enterprises do not have knowledge of.

Imagine if this happened across an entire carrier's servers. For Verizon Wireless that could be 90 million people. Everybody should think twice if these services could really save your data up in the cloud.

With lost data being a competitive liability, there is no room for downtime in today's business world.