Black Friday and The Art of the BCP Test

For many families, Black Friday is the center of their Thanksgiving tradition. The planning you do before heading to the mall can be used to help your employees understand why tabletop exercises are so important before doing a full blown (or live fire) BCP test.

Lessons Learned from Superstorm Sandy

During and after Superstorm Sandy, power and communications were out. Weeks later, power is still out for tens of thousands and some buildings will be uninhabitable for months due to contamination. Cellphone carriers successfully fought the FCC on installing backup power and Netflix reported that viewership doubled on the East Coast. If your organization had a work-from-home disaster recovery plan, did it work?

When Is A Backup Not A Backup?

Even though his data was in the cloud and on multiple machines, Matt Honan lost a year’s worth of photos, emails, documents, and who knows what else. The lesson? Back up to disk, tape, or something else and lock it away.

What’s on the Horizon

At VMWorld and at Open Mobile Summit this year, VMware showed off a new product currently code-named Horizon. While some websites are calling Horizon a mobile platform that creates a “phone within a phone,” Horizon is much more than that. Think of whatever computing device you have in your hands as a window to your applications […]

What Does “Data Loss” Mean To You?

Protecting your data against loss means protecting it against a spectrum of risks. If you are worried about corruption or deletion of data, then you should be thinking about replication and backup. If you are worried about your data falling into the wrong hands, then you should be thinking about data encryption solutions along with access controls and separation of duties. Last but not least, if you are worried about regulatory compliance or eDiscovery, then you might also have a requirement to store your data in a provably read-only form.

Workplace Recovery and PCs

In a Chinese kitchen, there is a lot of prep work to do before you can start cooking. The same is true before you can move into a workplace recovery center. Secure Pocket Drive from SPYRUS can make this prep work a lot easier.

An Untested Plan Is Worse Than No Plan At All

TATA’s London Data Center lost power, a customer had to tell them, and the UPS batteries were depleted because the 3 generators failed to start. Oh, and once the batteries died, so did their phones.

A Sidekick In The Pants – The Final Countdown?

Microsoft said Thursday that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data that it initially feared might have been permanently lost. I am guessing that they located an older offline backup and are working on restoring it and applying any changes made to user data after the backup was made. This means that […]

A Sidekick In The Pants – Part 2

Thousands to tens of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick customers may have lost all of their data. Here are some more thoughts on data protection.