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IT Job Descriptions

The job descriptions contained within the Internet and Information Technology Position Descriptions HandiGuide® are all in a standard format and are available as in PDF, WORD 2003, and WORD 2007 formats.  All of the job descriptions were review and update to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and the ISO 27000 security standard.  More...

Disaster Recovery Planning Template News

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 Over 50% of all organizations have no plan in place to recover their critical information should an unforeseen event occur, and almost as many have no strategy to keep their business running following a major disruption.

The findings are in just released research into data management practices. It found 48 per cent of organizations admitted to having no business continuity plan, and 51 per cent have no disaster recovery (DR) procedures.

This lack of DR planning is consistent with surveys done out in 2007 and 2009. The current research was compiled in an online survey of 1,000 companies last October.

The survey found that some companies are following best practice in data management: 18 per cent said they could restore mission-critical applications within four hours if their network or data center were destroyed; 23 per cent cited a recovery time of up to one business day and 22 per cent cited four business days or more.

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Business Continuity Planning 101

The basic process for developing a business continuity plan is:

• Create a business continuity planning team: Members should be from operations management, the chief security officer, the IT department, legal staff, and human resources.
• Define leadership roles: Determine which executives and employees are critical to operating the business (and supporting customers) that need to have access to key systems and information at all time.
• Assume the worst and plan for needed extra capacity: Before an event occurs, businesses need to plan ahead for increased network bandwidth and secured remote access requirements.
• Define emergency voice and data communications solutions: There are many to choose from, but a SSL VPN is one of the leading solutions to provide flexible, remote access, which is essential to any business continuity plan.
• Define access points for operations, network and IT: Create a business continuity portal for employees and partners. If the company has an Intranet, this site becomes command central from which employees can access information - HR policies, emergency contacts and a "start here" feature should be included.
• Contract for a secondary back-up site: Should the primary site be unavailable, companies should have a real-time mirror of data and staff housed at a secure facility.
• Backup data: In the event that the secondary site is unavailable, organizations should plan for multiple layers of failover.
• Plan to utilize smartphones and tablets: With mobile devices and "wireless networks", IT departments can leverage these tools to ensure complete connectivity in times of emergencies.
• Pre-arrange Internet meeting capabilities: In the event of an office closure, employees still need to communicate internally or with external parties (i.e. suppliers, customers). Implement the technology before it is needed
• Review number of sites and VPN gateways: Conducting an annual audit to provide a complete picture of your network and the ability to address problem areas before a disaster strikes.
• Test and  test again: These 'fire drills' enable the business continuity team to see how the current system is working, especially when employees are accessing information from remote locations (i.e. from home, a relative's house, and hotel). Once complete, those in management, IT and human resources can modify their business continuity plan accordingly.
  

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Core backup and recovery concerns

CIOs and IT Managers need to consider manadated compliance requirements

• Question that need to be answered are:
• Is our data safe in transit and at rest?
• What prevents hackers from gaining access to our data?
• Is our data properly handled, stored, and deleted?
• Who can access our data?
• What are the benchmark measurements?
• Is our data backup strategy compliant?
• Will our recovery be successful?

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How long should it take to create a business continuity plan?

Business continuity planning is a continual process, and not something that is done once and filed away to be used in an emergency. In error many organisations treat the creation of a business continuity plan as a normal project, subsequently deploying the plan and handing over to an operational department for maintenance.

In most organizations, DR is the quintessential complex, unfamiliar task. Disasters happen so rarely that recovery operations are the opposite of routine. What's more the myriad, interconnected data, application and other resources that must be recovered after a disaster make recovery an exceptionally difficult and error-prone effort.

How to create a business continuity plan...

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Which states had the fewest major weather disasters

The U.S. has sustained 112 weather/climate disasters over the past quarter century in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total standardized losses for the 112 events exceed $750 billion, according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climatic Data Center.

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Foundation necessary for disaster recovery and business continuity

As an essential foundation step toward disaster recovery and business continuity readiness, are these best practices:

• Extending management technologies that automate the process of asset management, system configuration, and software distribution (This reduced the number of steps that required hands-on intervention and reduced IT staff time.)
• Constraining their environment to a finite number of standard processors, operating systems, database products - making it easier to maintain and update
• Consolidating servers over a long-term road map, reducing the number of server "footprints" that had to be maintained and updated
• Standardizing IT practices, especially management of settings and configurations
• Providing protected storage space within the organization's storage resources and establishing rules for backup of mission-critical data (This ensured adequate capacity for backup and recovery procedures and for restart of applications.)
  

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Information security incident management - 27035:2011

ISO has announced the official launch of the new International Standard entitled 'Information technology – Security techniques – Information security incident management', the standard gives ‘how to’ guidance on detecting, reporting and assessing information security incidents and vulnerabilities.

ISO says that ISO/IEC 27035:2011 will help organizations respond to information security incidents, including the activation of appropriate controls for the prevention and reduction of, and recovery from, impacts, and, in so doing, learn and improve their overall approach.

Edward Humphreys, whose team developed the original version of the standard, ISO/IEC TR 18044:2004, commented: “Effective and timely handling of major incidents can make the difference between the survival or death of an organization. The new ISO/IEC 27035 standard provides tried and tested advice on the processes and methods that need to be deployed for ensuring effective management of information security incidents.

Incidents can vary from the minor, which may have an impact on an isolated business system to a major incident, which affects all business systems. Some incidents have the effect of disrupting an organization and the use of its business resources for 24-72 hours or more; some cause a serious loss and/or destruction of data and some can leave the organization with a serious crime on their hands. ISO/IEC 27035:2011 offers a solution.

ISO/IEC 27035:2011, which replaces technical report ISO/IEC TR 18044:2004, supports the general concepts specified in ISO/IEC 27001:2005.

The new standard is applicable to any organization, irrespective of size. It covers a range of information security incidents, whether deliberate or accidental, and whether caused by technical or physical means.

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Business Continuity Experts Do Not Agree on a Key Definition

The maximum tolerable period of disruption (MTPD) is the term used for the requirement within which a recovery time objective (RTO) needs to be set. It is not universally accepted by business continuity practitioners and still seems to cause a great deal of confusion.

The Business Continuity Institute's Good Practice Guidelines defines MTPD as "The duration after which an organization's viability will be irreparably damaged if a product or service delivery cannot be resumed." This seems straightforward and unambiguous enough, but it's only when you look closely at the definition and try to think about how it might be applied in practice that you'll see that not only is it of very little use, but it is also different from what was originally intended.

If something does not work in practice then the theory is wrong. The idea that there is some point beyond which an organization's viability will be irreparably damaged if a product or service delivery cannot be resumed would be an extremely useful concept if such a thing existed. However, in practice, you will never really know if an organization's viability has been irreparably damaged until the organization fails, let along the point at which this happens.

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Disasters can occur any where at any time

Disasters are unpredictable by nature and can strike anywhere at anytime with little or no warning. Recovering from one is expensive and time consuming, particularly for those who have not taken the time to think ahead and prepare for such possibilities.

Disaster Planning - Janco has found that 80% of all enterprises that do not have a disaster recovery / business continuity plan in place before a disaster occurs never reopen.  However, when disaster strikes, those who have prepared and made recovery plans survive with comparatively minimal loss and/or disruption of productivity.

Disasters can take several different forms. Some primarily impact individuals -- e.g., hard drive meltdowns -- while others have a larger, collective impact. Disasters can occur such as power outages, floods, fires, storms, equipment failure, sabotage, terrorism, or even epidemic illness. Each of these can at the very least cause short-term disruptions in normal business operation. But recovering from the impact of many of the aforementioned disasters can take much longer, especially if organizations have not made preparations in advance.

Most of us recognize that these potential problems as possibilities. Unfortunately the randomness of some of these disasters lulls some organizations into a sense of false security-"that's not likely to happen here." However, if proper preparations have been made, the disaster recovery process does not have to be exceedingly stressful. Instead the process can be streamlined, but this facilitation of recovery will only happen where preparations have been made. Organizations that take the time to implement disaster recovery plans ahead of time often ride out catastrophes with minimal or no loss of data, hardware, or business revenue. This in turn allows them to maintain the faith and confidence of their customers and investors.

Disaster Recovery Planning is the factor that makes the critical difference between the organizations that can successfully manage crises with minimal cost and effort and maximum speed, and those that are left picking up the pieces for untold lengths of time and at whatever cost providers decide to charge; organizations forced to make decision out of desperation.

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Reducing recovery time

Rather than thinking of a recovery effort as a sequence of three steps performed in a more or less linear way - first, data recovery, then application re-hosting, then user reconnection.

Janco suggests an alternative. First, sufficient data (including application software) is used to re-host the application and users are reconnected to the recovery platform where they can proceed with order taking, email, and other functions. At the same time, more and more of the production system’s historical data is recovered.

 

Such a strategy has the potential to abbreviate time-to-recovery by making critical application functionality available to workers sooner, enabling work to continue almost immediately after an
interruption event occurs and while the impact of the event is being reduced.

This strategy has enormous potential to improve business continuity strategies without significantly increasing their costs.

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