Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Recovery from Disaster--Beginning to Plan Enough of my Mac user bashing, as it is time to get back to other geeky things.  I ordered a 1 GB compact flash card for the camera today from Ecost.com.  After the mail-in rebate, the card will work out to just under $50.  Nice!  Work has not been terribly exciting the last couple of days.  I have been working on a couple of loose ends concerning backups and server replacements.  I should have spent that time learning myself some Perl.  I think that is what is going on tomorrow.  I have also been working on my role in the disaster recovery project within our stem.  Disaster recovery has become an essential part of working in IT these days, but some of the material is incredibly dry.  I have started to read the IT disaster recovery guidelines for the State of Maryland, and I have found this to be an incredibly tedious document.  Another document I have looked at but not yet read is the State of Arizona Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan.  Most of these plans began to be promulgated following September 11, 2001 and the New York City Blackout of 2003.  Basically, they all start with the notion that core business functions have been identified and that threats and vulnerabilities have been identified.  Also, a disaster is not necessarily defined by something along the lines of a terrorist attack--it can be a flood, fire, or similar disaster.  The bottom line with these plans is that a plan is in place for the resumption of services as quickly as possible.  It also details a temporary suspension of electronic services if recovery time warrants it.  Essentially, your "time to recover" is defined by how long an outage can be endured.  Right now, we are identifying folks on the hardware, facilities, and operations side of our house that would be needed in responding to a disaster.  This includes a lot of groups with core IT functions--networking and telecommunications, server support, and operations and production control.  The people identified become members of a emergency response team to be contacted in the event of an emergency.  We are still at the tip of a very large iceberg on this project.  It should be interesting and actually fun to use some of my non-IT chops.  I will probably post more on this in the future.  I do, of course, welcome any interesting crumbs of wisdom on this topic.  Of course, telling me to put my head between my legs and kissing my ass goodbye in the event of a disaster is welcome, too.  3:36:18 PM    comment []  trackback []

Take That, Mac Users! As I mentioned in Friday's post, I have unsubscribed from the Mac user's list here.  Command confirmation Confirming: > SIGNOFF MAC-TERP You have been removed from the MAC-TERP list. Goodbye, you damn Mac users!  11:50:52 AM    comment []  trackback []