Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery – A Business Not a Technology Issue

Hackers, hurricanes, fires, flooding, power outages, denial of service attacks, application failures, employee error, sabotage and now terrorism are helping companies to focus on the necessity of a business continuity plan.

Through the late 1990s as companies prepared for Y2K, many IT executives, risk managers, CFOs and corporate managers realized that recovering computing systems, networks and data was not enough. As Y2K approached, it became more apparent that a disciplined approach was needed to recover not only data and systems, but also business processes, facilities and manpower to restore and maintain critical functions.

The starting point is a risk assessment. Identify and define your mission critical business processes and systems. Review them for vulnerabilities and identify steps required for restoration and recovery. For your data, make sure it is backed up to secure and separate locations. Evaluate various storage solutions including storage area networks, data replication systems, new virtualization systems, network attached storage devices and managed storage. Pay significant attention also to your telecommunications providers to ensure they have built diversity and redundancy into their networks and have well developed and tested contingency plans.

The risk assessment will start to drive out real questions on the business impacts and losses that could result from disruptions. Mission critical impacts, key business functions, processes and records must all be identified. This is also the time to determine resource requirements and acceptable recovery time frames.

Various recovery strategies should be evaluated to achieve your cost, reliability and time to recover objectives. Include physical, technological, legal, regulatory and personnel considerations when you evaluate alternatives. Common points of failure are a lack of executive and budget support and not fully engaging employees. Along with your data, employees are your most valuable asset. An excellent checklist “Considerations for senior management during a time of crisis” is at www.globalcontinuity.com (enter checklists in the search box, click on DR & BC checklists).

Business continuity planning sounds expensive and it can be time-consuming. However, losing your business functions, processes and systems as well as your company, customer and financial data can be devastating. Build your plan. Train, test, train and test again.

About The Author

Robert Mahood has significant technology and management experience in data communications, internet, storage, disaster recovery and data recovery. He is currently the president of Midwest Data Recovery. www.midwestdatarecovery.com

bmahood@midwestdatarecovery.com, 866 786 2595 or 312 907 2100

Cisco CCNA / CCNP Exam Tutorial: Five Debugs You Must Know

To pass the BSCI exam and move one step closer to CCNP certification success, you ve got to know how and when to use debug commands to troubleshoot and verify network operations. While you should never practice debug commands on a production network, it s important to get some hands-on experience with them and not rely on “router simulators” and books to learn about them.
When it comes to RIP, “debug ip rip” is the primary debug to use. This debug will show you the contents of the routing update packets, and is vital in diagnosing RIP version mismatches and routing update authentication issues.
You know how to use the variance command to configure unequal-cost load-sharing with IGRP, but IGRP has no topology table that will give you the feasible successor metrics you need. With IGRP, you need to use the “debug ip igrp transactions” command to get these vital metrics.
Several factors are considered by OSPF-enabled routers when it comes to forming adjacencies, including hello and dead timer settings. If an adjacency doesn t form when you think it should, run “debug ip ospf adj”. The reason the adjacency isn t forming is usually seen quickly with this command s output.
Let s not ignore Layer Two! If frame relay mappings are not forming according to your configuration, run “debug frame lmi”. This debug will allow you to quickly diagnose and correct any LMI mismatches.
When it comes to PPP, it can be very frustrating to try to spot a problem with a password or username. Instead of staring at the configuration for 10 minutes, run “debug ppp negotiation” and send a ping over the link. This command will help you spot the router with the misconfigured username or password, not to mention saving you a lot of time!
Effectively using debugs during your CCNA and CCNP exam study will help you truly understand what s going on “behind the command” – and it will really come in handy on that day when your production network just isn t doing what you (think) you told it to do!
Chris Bryant, CCIE 12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage, home of free CCNA and CCNP tutorials, The Ultimate CCNA Study Package, and Ultimate CCNP Study Packages. For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, How To Pass The CCNA and How To Pass The CCNP , visit the website and download your free copies. You can also get FREE CCNA and CCNP exam questions every day! Pass the CCNA exam with The Bryant Advantage!

Protect your Computer and Internet Privacy

Is a known fact that every time you open a browser to view a web page, order something online, or read your email in a web based viewer that information is stored on your computer for later use. Whether you are viewing the weather online, reading sports, catching up on the latest world news or viewing something a little more private, all that information is stored in your computer. Windows operating systems store all this material in what are called Temporary Internet Files or cache. Web pages may store bits of information about who you are when you visit web sites in files called cookies on your computer. Your web browser will store a list of web sites you ve visited and places you ve gone in a history file in your computer. Even if you are not online, programs will store histories of the files you ve opened, played, or viewed.
Generally there might not be any reason to worry about all these files in your computer, but what if you sell your computer and all that information is left for someone else to see. Maybe friends and relatives visit and use your computer and you dont want everyone to know what files you are running on your computer. Then you are going to want to know how to delete these files.
Even if you are not worried about privacy on your computer, you may be surprised to realize how much hard drive space all this information takes up. If you are running out of drive space, you may want to delete these files.
How can I delete these files?
For Internet Explorer 5 and above, you can follow these directions to clear out temporary files and delete cookies.
1) Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools
2) Click on Internet Options
3) On the General Tab, in the middle of the screen, click on Delete Files
4) You may also want to check the box “Delete all offline content”
5) Click on OK and wait for the hourglass icon to stop after it deletes the temporary internet files
6) You can now click on Delete Cookies and click OK to delete cookies that websites have placed on your hard drive.
To clear the Internet History in IE:
1) Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools
2) Click on Internet Options
3) On the General Tab, in the middle of the screen,click on Clear History
4) Click OK
To clean up other temporary files on your computer in Windows 98 or higher:
1) Click Start, Programs (or All Programs), Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup
2) Choose the correct drive usually C:
3) Check the boxes in the list and delete the files
This deleting method is only good if you want to free space, because normal file deletion only removes a file s directory entry, and leaves the data contained in the file on your hard drive, which can be easily recovered by any average computer user using a undelete utility. If you delete cookies or if you delete history using conventional methods anyone can recover them! Even after a hard drive format, files can be recovered using expensive hardware and software which use forensic latency track analysis algorithms.
There are several good utilities such as http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/ that http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/?v=deletecookies http://www.amicutilities.com/privacy-guard/?v=deletehistory