Every so often discussions arise outside the domain of disaster recovery plans, but that trigger thought-provoking questions. One recent example was about the extent to which backup tapes destined for DR were accessible or not for legal information discovery. This is the procedure whereby the databases of an organisation can be searched by the opposite…
There’s something about the number seven that makes it a favourite choice for models of all sorts. They range from the layers of the standard network model (the OSI version at least) to telephone selling methodologies (depending on what you’re selling) and of course colours of the rainbow. Since 1956 and “Miller’s Law” in psychology,…
With the emphasis in disaster recovery planning on safeguarding and restoring data, it may sound strange to talk about deliberate data destruction. After all, isn’t that the exact opposite of what DR teams in businesses are trying to achieve? However, like the yin and the yang of the universe, destroying data is a natural counterpart…
Statistics from the 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report from network provider Verizon indicate that the biggest thieves of data are now the hacktivists – activists with the ability to hack into organisational data systems. Hacktivism puts a new spin on the business case for business continuity because they are no longer hacking just to show…
In the days when business continuity was still mostly a competitive advantage, there was a tendency to think of maximum tolerable outage as being defined by external customer expectations. Whether for manufacturing, finance or other industry sectors, MTO was measured in terms of effect on the customer base, likely customer reactions and the impact on…
Yes, you can take that title literally. While the debate goes on about whether a disaster recovery plan should be centred on back-up to hard disk or tape, there’s a new kid on the storage block (or around the corner for the moment) – DNA. In a paper entitled “Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA”,…