When an Amazon Web Services data center lost power one Wednesday in early December, the company wrote about the unfolding event with the brevity and tension of one its bestselling pot boilers.

Continue reading Amazon’s data center outage reads like a thriller

Tags: Amazon, anecdote, case study, cloud computing, data center outage, network outage

It’s no secret that building up effective disaster recovery (DR) capabilities is peppered with challenges. From identifying business requirements and mapping them to non-budget-busting technology solutions to coping with the operational impact of disaster recovery planning and testing, it seems that every step of the process introduces hurdles to overcome.

Continue reading Disaster recovery best practices: Avoiding DR interdependency predicaments

Tags: best practices, I.T. DIsaster Recovery, interdependency, return on investment, ROI, uptime

This practical paper outlines an approach to integrating business impact assessment into crisis management in order to strengthen the quality of information based decision making. It is intended to be read alongside an accompanying Excel spreadsheet.

Continue reading Business impact assessment and damage reporting for effective crisis management

Tags: business impact assessment, crisis management

What new business trends and technologies can we expect to appear in the workplace?

Continue reading Technology trends that business continuity managers need to be aware of

Tags: technology, trends

This study deals with the relationship between organizational flexibility, crisis response and learning.

Continue reading Learning from Crisis: A Framework of Management, Learning and Implementation in Response to Crises

Tags: crisis management, crisis response

ContinuitySA offers ten issues South African businesses they expect will face in 2010.

Continue reading International: Top 10 business continuity issues South African companies will face in 2010

Tags: Business Continuity, South Africa, threats

Aravo, a provider of SaaS Supplier Information Management (SIM) software and services, announced the results of a supplier risk poll exploring the opinions and concerns of Fortune 1000 executives.

Continue reading Survey: Supply Chain Risk Management

Tags: Aravo, Risk Management, Supplier Information Management, supply chain

Though an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) performs many important functions, most users value them chiefly for the emergency energy they provide during a power outage. UPSs give IT personnel the time they need to protect sensitive equipment and data from the effects of an electrical service interruption by shutting down systems in an orderly fashion or starting a backup generator.

Continue reading Emerging UPS Standby Power Sources: Four Promising Alternatives to the Lead Acid Battery

Tags: backup generator, backup power, battery backup, flywheels, fuel cells, lead acid battery, lithium ion batteries, standby power, ultracapacitors, Uninterruptible power supply, UPS

Back in the 1980′s, floppy drives were 5.5 inches, tapes were round, and disk drive capacity was measured in tens of megabytes, not the multiple terabyte versions we see today.

The problem backup administrators face today is the notion that backup does nothing for the bottom line. Since it’s not a customer facing application, it can be neglected and provided with minimal budget (same for disaster recovery (DR) by the way!). The good news for backup administrators is that the actual technology for backing up data has advanced dramatically over the last few years.

As companies continue to find new ways to save money, the new year holds promise for innovative solutions to the backup problem. As the process of backup and DR replication continue to converge, continuous data protection with multiple stage dedupe and replication should make an impact on the installed base of traditional backup solutions.

See Why is the backup process stuck in the 80′s?, by Chris Poelker, Intelligent Storage Networking, for ComputerWorld.

Tags: backup, data backup, Disaster Recovery, I.T. DIsaster Recovery

You’ve written your disaster plan and distributed it to your staff. You’ve included all the points required for a decent plan: assigning a disaster recovery team and coordinator, creating detailed recovery procedures and instructions and call trees with employees and vendors. You’ve covered hot topics such as pandemic planning and long term back-up power. Now you sit back and wait for a disaster to show how ready your systems are for it, right?

Continue reading Disaster Recovery Plan Testing 101

Tags: exercise, test, walkthrough

Continuity Forum has announced details of activities in Australia and New Zealand linked to the international Business Continuity Awareness Week (22 – 26 March 2010).

Continue reading Australia and New Zealand Business Continuity Awareness Week activities

Tags: Australia, awareness, BCAW, bci, business continuity awareness week, Business Continuity Institute, new zealand