Summary of Bundle Offering

Issues include, failing over to the backup site is a manual process and most systems do not include a mechanism to fail back to the primary site. Getting the primary site back online is a labor- and network-intensive process. Another is that most email systems do not utilize compression, which results in additional network bandwidth consumption.

• Test your disaster recovery plan at least quarterly. Simply having a plan in place is not enough. Develop and regularly (quarterly) test your plan so that the first time it is executed is not during an emergency. Remember to test under realistic conditions and make the plan robust enough to address extended recovery that may require utilization of new facilities, relocation of staff and involvement of outside personnel.
• Review and reassign responsibilities at least monthly. Factor in changes to your organization caused by recent layoffs and restructurings. Assign new responsibilities to employees based on the current organizational structure and available resources. Test this updated plan to ensure all tools and protocols are in place to operate during a disaster, reaching out to all parts of the organization and employee family members as well as vendors, government agencies and emergency responders.
• Update your notification system at least monthly. Critical during any potential interruption, notification should be an integral part of an organizationÂ’s disaster recovery plan. Make sure all contact numbers are up-to-date, allowing the organization to get in touch with key personnel in the event of an emergency. This will also help prioritize methods of communication and track which employees have received messages.
• Know where staff will work if you lose your facility. Employees are the heart of an organization; however, many human resources aspects are frequently overlooked in disaster recovery planning. Businesses must identify alternate locations where employees can go in the event a primary work location is unavailable and address the physical safety and psychological well-being of employees. Assign backup roles for the inevitable times when key players are not available or missing, and time-sensitive actions need to be taken. Employ cross training to have alternative contacts ready to go.
• If a Disaster is DECLARED EXECUTE your plan. If an organization has access to hot or cold back-up sites, a common mistake is to wait too long before declaring an emergency and relocating personnel. If an organization is located in an area for which a government evacuation order has been issued, it should declare and relocate immediately.
• Document your technology infrastructure. Develop procedures for technical recovery scripts that will be deployed to help get your IT infrastructure up and running. Make the scripts comprehensive and easy to understand so people who are not familiar with them can easily follow along.
• Update your vendor list at least monthly. Strictly enforce change management and control processes to help ensure vendor contacts are current so vital services will be quickly available when needed.
• Review the use of contractors and outsourced facilities. In the event of a disaster, will your vendors be able to perform their roles in supporting your critical technical infrastructure and business processes? Consider looking at secondary providers as a precaution. Take time to evaluate whether support or maintenance contracts need to be extended or have levels of support modified.
• Review and test readiness and completeness of offsite data storage. Paper records and backup tapes may be totally lost, destroyed or unavailable. Develop contingencies in the event delivery of offsite-stored data is delayed. Investigate using electronic media - through disk-to-disk backup - to help safeguard and provide backup information.
• Have a current plan in place to re-build your critical servers. Should a disaster occur, re-building servers from the ground up consumes time and stretches internal IT resources. Consider working with a third-party provider that can simplify these processes by rebuilding your operating systems on its own servers - enabling a speedy and more cost-effective recovery.

Disaster planning is an essential component of preserving your enterpriseÂ’s assets. With a written disaster plan, your enterprise can reduce the risk of disaster and minimize losses. The Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template is perfect for small and medium-sized institutions that do not have in-house preservation staff.  The Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template is also valuable for large enterprises that need to develop separate but related plans for multiple buildings, locations, or branches.

The Janco Disaster Recovery Plan Template can help you create a plan for disaster prevention and response. Enter data into the online template to create a customized disaster plan for your enterprise. This plan will help you:

• Prevent or mitigate disasters,
• Prepare for the most likely emergencies,
• Respond quickly to minimize damage if disaster strikes, and
• Recover effectively from disaster while continuing to provide enterprise services to your customers and clients

According to Janco Associates, the primary factor in the activiation of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans is computer hardware failure.

When a pandemic strikes your enterprise the business continuity and disaster recovery plans need to allow IT workers to manage computer systems from home.  There is no other alternative but to have them in the office.

A Level 6 alert means that company officials will be asked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to undertake a number of efforts to fight any pandemic -- including the appointment of a workplace Pandemic Coordinator or team.

The Pandemic Coordinator is responsible for monitoring employees to ensure they follow basic rules of hygiene, such as washing hands, and to make sure that breathing masks are available. If a worker becomes sick, the Pandemic Coordinator must ensure they go home.

The real issue is not sick employees, but an inability to get supplies and deliveries.

If your enterprise is in a locality that gets to pandemic levels of infection your enterprise is going to see issues like suppliers not being able to get deliveries to you because they are sick.  This will be a regional issue, even if your organization is not directly affected by the flu.

If you have rolled out encryption, how do you maintain your IT service quality when the hard disk drive fails? How do you plan and prepare for a data loss when the userÂ’s computer is encrypted?  These are all issues that should be considered when putting together a data disaster plan. In addition, data recovery, one of the more common missing elements of a disaster recovery plan, should also be factored in because it can serve as the “Hail Mary” attempt when all other options have been exhausted.

Carbonite, EMC's Mozy, and Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) are providers in the growing online backup market. The services let consumers and enterprises back up their data over the Internet for later retrieval if a hard drive or another component should fail. Carbonite targets its service toward home and small-business users.

Carbonite is suing storage vendor Promise Technology, saying repeated failures of Promise gear have caused "significant data loss" at Carbonite.

In the lawsuit, Carbonite said it bought more than $3 million (US Dollars) worth of Promise VTrak Raid products beginning in 2006. In several incidents starting in January 2007, the service provider suffered data loss because the Promise gear failed to support recovery from physical drive errors and array errors. The data losses caused "substantial damage" to Carbonite's business, the company alleged.