Disaster recovery planning for your IT installations may use automated procedures for a number of situations. Virtual machines can often be switched or re-started in case of server failure, and network communications can be rerouted without human intervention. For other requirements, people will be involved in getting IT systems up and running properly after an…
The answer to this question depends on how fast you want your data back and how much time and effort you are prepared to spend. If your data is both mission and time critical, then full, frequent backups possibly with mirrored systems for immediate restore or failover may be the only solution. Financial trading organisations,…
As cloud computing develops and providers multiply their data centres, physical location of data has become an important issue for many organisations. Their goal has often been to prevent storage of confidential data outside their national boundaries. The risk of a data breach is considered to be too great, especially in the wake of the…
There are times when you wish you could undo what you just did. Sometimes, you can’t. Financial investments, office reorganisations and even that too-hasty email you sent often cannot simply be reversed. With IT on the other hand, it’s a different story. From individual PCs to corporate data centres, the ‘Undo’ function has become a…
People who manage a functional department or a business process may find it tough to set recovery objectives for what they manage so devotedly, day in and day out. That does not necessarily mean that they are not objective. Instead, they may not know how critical their part of the business is to the rest…
If you haven’t yet met cross site scripting or XSS for short, it’s probably only a matter of time. And if your enterprise is running a web site that allows users to enter data, for example as search terms, consider XSS as a threat to be tackled now, not later. The short version of what…