Disaster Recovery Journal

Each year as winter gets closer our customers start to think about winter weather and how it will impact their business (if you are one of the lucky ones in the south, pray for a warm winter and no snow!).  We are asked the same thing every year “How can we protect our business better?”.  While this is a valid question, there are lots of other factors to take into account.  First and foremost what is a disaster?  Second, How does it differ from a disruption?

With the recent explosion of mobile devices and their increased power, we are being asked about “accessing our BC/DR plan from a mobile device”.  As more and more companies are taking their plans online/cloud based and their workforce is increasingly more mobile, having access to their plan on their device is becoming a reality.  Where does this leave all these apps that we see everyday?  Let’s take a look…

Jim Balsillie (co-CEO of BlackBerry) told a conference in November 2010 (only seven months ago) that “We believe that you can bring the mobile to the Web but you don’t need to go through some kind of control point of an SDK, and that’s the core part of our message.”.  While that might work in concept, BlackBerry is being crushed under the Android and Apple onslaught of Apps.  It really is simple, users don’t want to access information that is designed for a larger screen, crunched into a little 4 in screen.  Alternatively, they don’t want a stripped down edition where they are shown limited information decided upon by the developer of the website.  With more than 300,000 apps available for iPhones alone, I think the market has spoken.

Oh no…  There is a storm coming!

Oh no…  There is a labor strike coming!

You've got through the first month of 2011... Honestly, how did you do with your New Year's Resolutions? Chances are, like the rest of us, these resolutions fell by the wayside and you quickly returned to your regular routine. Well, now is the time to use February as your second chance.

Take a look back at that list of New Year's Resolutions. I'm guessing that there were items on your "professional" resolution list such as: more productivity, employee retention, hit all sales numbers, engage current clients, follow-up with all company/product requests, build brand awareness, etc. These are all excellent resolutions for each and every business - regardless of your vertical. The interesting aspect to these resolutions is the hidden common thread: business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

On Wednesday, the province of British Colombia lead by example. Over 420,000 people participated in a province-wide earthquake drill.

At 10 a.m., radio stations through-out the province sounded an alarm and students, office workers, clergy, and church-goers, dove under desks, tables and other stable and sturdy pieces of furniture and hung on for a minute to simulate what to do when the expected big earthquake hits British Colombia.

Ouch, have you looked at the thermometer lately? With temperatures in the minus 25 to 30 range, parts of Canada and the United States are in a deep freeze. Some people will shrug off this cold and simply say "it is part of life in Canada and the United States. Not a big deal really," but luckily, you know better. Right?

This cold weather can and is impacting your business. Everything seems to slow down with the cold. Employees are getting into the office a bit later - their cars won't start, the public transit system is delayed, they really just didn't feel like leaving the house, their kid's school bus was canceled. Some employees won't even making it in for those same reasons - no alternative means of transportation, kid's school is closed, public transit is too slow in this weather. And then there are the burst water pipes, the frozen sidewalks and driveways, and the general feeling of malaise that seems to come on with the cold.

This year at the Disaster Recovery Journal Spring World show, we'll be offering a 1.5 day course on the essentials of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

In association with Learning Tree International, we'll teach you how to:

It is the winter and as happens now in the winter Europe and England get their fair share of snow, ice and wintery weather. This happens regularly now. But for some reason, government officials, city officials and even the residents of these snow-covered communities, insist that this "never happens". Unfortunately, things have changed and winter is a fact of life now for much of Europe and England - the snow is going to come and it will wreak havoc on the day-to-day lives of people.

The interesting thing about this snow phenomenon is that even though the snow has been coming regularly and more forcefully year after year, people still want to pretend that it simply never happens. On Friday we were chatting with our sponsored cyclo-cross rider Vicki Thomas who is living in Belgium this winter. This is Vicki's fourth winter in Belgium and the fourth winter in which she has been forced indoors to train due to snow... But as she says, people still will say to her "we just aren't prepared for the snow. It never snows here." Vicki told us of people driving in the snowstorms with summer tires on or even simply not leaving their houses when it snows! Imagine living in Canada or the northern U.S. and not leaving your house when it snows!

What a week it has been - and its only Wednesday. The news reports have been filled with reports of WikiLeaks scandals, bombings in Sweden, massive snow storms in Ontario, the latest release of diseases that pose a threat to everyday people, and lets not forget the lay-offs of 600 employees at Yahoo. Not really feeling the holiday spirit these days when we browse news sites or listen to the news.

All of these events that have highlighted our daily news feeds for the last few days really all have one underlying message: it is so very important to be prepared. You just really never know what is going to happen. More often than not we (yes, I'm including myself here....) live in a little bubble. We believe that we are safe from the problems, disasters, miscues and troubles affecting others around the world. How many times have you read a news story about a tragedy or disaster and though "thank goodness that will never happen to me"?

Earlier in the week we posted on this blog about WikiLeaks and disaster recovery. Honestly, this is a topic that I never really thought we’d be writing about: WikiLeaks. As mentioned in the earlier post, most of the WikiLeak announcements didn’t register on our radar and really I thought we’d be writing only the one post about this popular topic. Until I read Thursday’s Globe and Mail…

An article in this national daily newspaper caught my attention – it was about a Toronto company who by virtue of a typo was caught in the middle of the latest WikiLeaks storm. Toronto-based EasyDNS was confused for a company called EveryDNS in blog post about the WikiLeaks brouhaha. The result of this confusion over company names has meant that EasyDNS is busy defending itself against customers who are upset with this association with WikiLeaks (one that did not exist before the spelling error…).