New Rothstein Associates Industry Resource Database now available


With over 6,000 listings in more than 250 categories, the database serves business continuity professionals, emergency planners and managers, security professionals and corporate managers to ensure that their organizations are prepared for and can recover from any type of natural or man-made disaster.

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Backup tapes used for ‘disaster recovery’ are not reasonably accessible in discovery


In addressing the discovery of information stored on backup tapes, courts make an implicit and critical distinction between “disaster recovery” backup tapes and backup tapes that are used to archive information.

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Survey: Majority Of European Offices Not Protecting Confidential Printed Data


According to Samsung’s research, 56 percent of workers regularly see confidential documents abandoned on the printer, 51 percent not aware of any processes or technologies in place at their organization to protect the printer network itself

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How and Why to Create Data Destruction Policies


We are collecting data at ever-increasing rates as the costs of data storage go down. Why get rid of our beloved data when we can always buy more storage space? Some companies like Google love collecting and working with data, and these companies will rarely or never get rid of their data. But odds are your company is not like Google and does not need all of that old data. This column focuses on crafting an effective data destruction policy.

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Enterprise content management a player in disaster recovery program


For all the talk about living in a digital age, paper content, from account invoices and Human Resources records to intellectual property, still fuels the business processes of many organizations, even those with sophisticated IT systems. But quick recovery of paper content — a fragile medium in fire and flood — is often an afterthought in disaster recovery and business continuity planning. An enterprise content management system, the modern-day descendant of tactical document imaging tools, can act as a safety net in a disaster and even play a strategic role in a disaster recovery program.

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University of Hawaii Purchased Disaster-Resistant Hard Drives Following Flooding


In 2004, the University of Hawaii experienced a flood that swamped the bottom floors of several buildings. As a result of the flood, the university library science program lost samples used in research projects, which then had to be restarted.

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Product Review: FireKing MediaVault


I suppose I’ve always gotten carried away with data backups. At any point in time, usable, recent copies of our company’s critical data are stored in at least five physical locations, in at least three different backup formats, and I regularly run tests to ensure the backups are usable and recoverable.  I use two different tape formats (DAT, and ULTRIUM); 3-drive, datacenter-grade RAID-5 array on our primary server; real-time backup to a gigabyte Buffalo Terastation with two pairs of RAID-5 drives; remote real-time copying of our most critical files to a server 1,000+-miles away; snapshots of key files to a secondary server; and, storage of backup tapes in 3 separate locations.

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Survey: 53% of Small Firms in U.S. Don’t Archive E-Mail


A recently published survey of 421 IT executives at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. found that 53 percent of those surveyed have not implemented an e-mail archiving system within their organizations. The research was carried out by eMediaUSA on behalf of GFI Software, a developer of e-mail archiving software.

The survey also found among those companies currently using an e-mail archiving solution, 35 percent are relying on end users to manage their own e-mail archives, 35 percent use an in-house solution to archive e-mails, and 33 percent use tape backups.

Top reasons given for retaining e-mails included

  • internal inquiries and investigations (39 percent);
  • backup (31 percent);
  • compliance (28 percent); and,
  • reducing the load of mail quotas on Exchange Server (27 percent).

Among the reasons given by SMBs who are not using an e-mail archiving solution included the company is too small to need an archiving product (26 percent); they are not impacted by compliance regulations (21 percent); no budget (26 percent); and e-mails are stored on the mail server (23 percent).

Other key findings from the survey include:

  • 5 percent archive e-mails indefinitely, while 21 percent keep them six months to a year
  • 47 percent have had to search for old or deleted e-mails because of compliance requirements
  • 29 percent say it typically takes less than an hour to find an e-mail from 15 months ago or longer
  • 40 percent do not feel they are sufficiently informed about compliance and e-mail archiving issues

On a positive note, the survey found that 36 percent of respondents consider e-mail archiving important, and 23 percent found it very important. Further, more than half that use an e-mail archiving solution have had a positive experience using it.

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Don’t Forget Vital Records


Vital Records and Business Continuity

When is the last time you ]met with your company’s records manager?: What do you know about his/her needs? Is your firm migrating to an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy? If so, how will you integrate business continuity with this strategy? Dr. Jim Kennedy at Lucent has written a compelling discussion on the issues you must know regarding vital records. It’s no longer a matter of storing tapes and hard copies. Virtualization has changed the VR paradigm, and now is the time to get up to speed on this important activity.

The National Fire Protection Association publishes the principal standard for records management, NFPA 232: Standards for Protection of Records, Archives, Records Centers by National Fire Protection Association.

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