'It is a good deal to expect the unexpected' - Zanesville Times Recorder

Parts of the country of tornadoes ravaged news reports serve as a not so-subtle reminders, the replication systems can at any time. It is good business practice, to expect the unexpected from planning ahead for events that could potentially destroy a company. Although emergency response plans are the lack of proactive planning not at the top of the list of priorities for most organizations, if disaster strikes, quickly scramble is clearly such as management and employees blind in response. Unfortunately it may be too late.

In short, is not business emergency plans expect and what we all hope to prepare pass, but realistically know they can. These plans set out steps and measures to take, to situations react when employees, customers, assets and resources are threatened.

If a tornado recently store in Mooresville, n.c., employees quickly made the situation the Lowe's detected and driven everyone to a rear break room, only seconds before the tornado leveled most of the memory. Staff allegedly worked as a team, communicate with each other how she check courses on unsuspecting customers. It was only through their training and quickly think that each one about 100 customers and employees made it virtually unscathed by this life-threatening experience, save for some scary memories.

Submitted somewhere along the line, Lowe's successfully a plan for such a disaster, so employees prepared were, instinctively react and implement it when it counted.

Disasters come in all shapes, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, explosions, tsunamis, oil spills, nuclear power plant meltdowns, violence in the workplace or any number of natural or human caused disasters. Just in this week, tornadoes hit suddenly Ohio, including some close to home. It can occur at any time and anywhere, so that companies have to be prepared.

The task of putting together a plan person often falls to the Security Manager or HR, but this should be a team project with all levels of the organization. A person not can it alone. Preparedness starts with the support of top management and extends in any way to any employees.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides example emergency response plans for natural and technological disasters on your website. According to FEMA, employers should identify first the disasters are most likely in your company of the country on. For example, in the Southeastern Ohio, it doesn't have much meaning, a tsunami prepare, but it makes a lot of sense for a tornado or flood prepare.

If create an emergency plan, is it important crisis management, agencies, police, fire, and social service, with disaster and agencies to strengthen the plan and take advantage of local knowledge, to coordinate resources and capabilities. FEMA suggests, include emergency planning should coordinate emergency communication and development of escape routes and outputs set up a command center and assembly areas.

The emergency plan for each organization is different, but there are some components universal regardless of the organization or industry. Top priority should be to save his life and minimized risk of injury. Secondly, it is important to protect valuable business assets, including loss of records and electronic data to, and to plan strategies for recovery. If important proprietary customer or financial data is lost, it is devastating. Thirdly plans should include such companies after the disaster resume normal functioning can respond.

Take a team approach. Each Department of the company should be included, because everyone can and will be affected in any way, is when an emergency hits. The plan should be written, easy to read and practical. There should be any staff available, and all employees should be trained in their part of the plan. It is also important that the plan of updated, as soon as organization develops and changes. A stale plan doesn't help much in the heat of the moment when seconds count, can be confusing and raise the risk of liability. When possible, the plan to test before emergency work out the bugs, and training and practice drills with activation of the plan responsible staff assign.

"Be prepared." Scout to this motto learn early in life, but it's easy to forget as we get older. Prepared save injuries and life the unlikely case. The employees are a testament to this fact the Lowe in North Carolina and their customers.

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Virtual AIDS in disaster recovery planning - warez

BUDD LAKE, n.j., April 21 UPI)-US-software based virtual Corp. one received $ 49 million from the U.S. Department of Defense for disaster recovery software and services award.

"We are pleased, for this important (MOD) selected blanket purchase agreement were the virtual Corporation can support all Government and (Department) components," virtual Corp. President Scott said Ries.

"Our software is already certified DiaCAP and runs on RELATIONAL and NIPRnet platforms." "This BPA simplifies disaster recovery capabilities to continuity of Government and support to ensure the warfighter acquisition of software and services for the implementation of effective COOP (continuity of operations) and it."

Virtual Corp. said its COOP and disaster recovery software solution, sustainable Planner is available under this purchase agreement ceiling. SP enables Government and Department of Defense components managers easily implement a sustainable process to create, update and manage their own continuity of operations and IT disaster recovery plans.

The company said its continuity consultant also Department of Defense components and Federal Planning, assessment and recovery activities can support in all COOP and IT-DR.

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County officials: preparing nuclear accident makes very unlikely in NC - Hickory daily record

Officials of the Japanese government finally admitted to their citizens last week what many people had already feared:

That the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster resulting from earthquake and tsunami damage last month ranks at Level 7, the worst possible rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

Last Monday, Japanese authorities also declared radiation levels at the plant to be too high for anyone to work there.

In light of the Japanese disaster, many in western North Carolina quietly ask themselves:

Could this happen here?

The closest nuclear facility to the Hickory, Morganton, Statesville and Lenoir area is Duke Energy’s McGuire Nuclear Station on Lake Norman. It’s in Mecklenburg County some 17 miles northwest of Charlotte.

“The chances of radiation getting out of the McGuire plant property itself are really pretty small,” said Karen Yaussy, radiation control officer within the Catawba County Division of Emergency Management.

Not only is the McGuire facility located on an island in Lake Norman in a sparsely populated area, Yaussy said any radiation leaked into the atmosphere would “very likely” drift away from Catawba and surrounding counties.

“Most of our prevailing winds are actually west-to-east,” she said, “and that’s normally very much to our advantage.”

Some 1,600 Catawba County citizens live within a 10-mile radius of McGuire; more than 32,000 residents live in a 20-mile radius.

She acknowledges that western North Carolina is still a traditional “earthquake zone,” as is coastal North Carolina (Progress Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Station is located at Southport).

Plus, while the likelihood of an earthquake hitting McGuire is very small, the possibility of a tsunami is “not in the picture at all.”

Lessons learned from Japan mishap

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers told a CNN interviewer April 6 that the U.S. needs to start building more nuclear plants to replace its aging facilities, despite the crisis in Japan.

“We do need to pause. We do need to learn the lessons. We need to implement them. But I think at the end of the day, our industry is prepared to do that,” Rogers said.

Shortly after the incident in Japan, Duke announced that it has no plans to interrupt construction on its William S. Lee III plant in Cherokee County, SC.

That $11 billion nuclear plant has two more years in the licensing process, but it is scheduled to come on line in 2020 or 2021 with a pair of Westinghouse’s latest pressurized water reactors.

Yaussy is aware, too, that a tornado knocked off power at the Surry Nuclear Power Station on the James River in southeastern Virginia last Saturday afternoon. The twister was from the same line of tornadoes that left 23 dead and some 85,000 without of electricity in eastern North Carolina.

“The biggest challenge of a nuclear plant incident would be to keep our public informed of what we’re doing,” said Yaussy.

For instance, a major incident at McGuire would result in opening centers at both Maiden Middle School and at Bandys High School “to receive people to be monitored” for medical treatment.

“The schools,” said Yaussy, “could also be used as overnight shelters,” should that become necessary.

“The strength of our nuclear system,” she said, “is that we take emergency planning very seriously. We look at everything from an extended power failure, with backup systems down too, to other terrorist incidents.”

Since the Japanese disaster, Yaussy points out that she has “met several times” with her counterparts throughout the state and “have talked about a variety of possible nuclear incidents, including an airplane crashing into the McGuire plant, plus something happening to Lake Norman itself.”

“The beauty of a team is, the more minds thinking about it, the better the process, to make sure that we have thought of everything,” she said. “We’ve trained for all kinds of severe nuclear emergencies, but in the end, we’ve just been blessed not to have had a real nuclear event.”

Last week’s rating in Japan, up from Level 5, puts the Fukushima incident at the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the former Soviet Union. That incident resulted directly in the deaths of some 4,000 people and the resettlement of more than 350,000 others.

April 26 is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown, the world’s most serious manmade disaster to date.

Brought on line in December 1981, the McGuire plant’s two pressurized water reactors produce more than 17,600 gigawatt hours of electricity annually -- 44 percent of the nuclear power generated in North Carolina.

U.S. plant designs are different

Yaussy notes that the Westinghouse reactor designs used by Duke and other East Coast power companies “are a newer and more sophisticated design” than the one in so much trouble in Japan.

“The Duke technology is a closed-loop system,” she said, “where the cooling water and the fuel rods are not even near each other. It’s at least 10 years newer than the Japanese plant design and it’s thought to be much safer.”

“The thing about nuclear technology in the United States that helps us so much with safety is the very, very lengthy process of licensing—it takes decades—in which plans, designs, emergency drills all have been through a fine-tooth comb in advance.”

Progress Energy operates two North Carolina nuclear plants: the Shearon Harris Nuclear Station, about 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, and the Brunswick plant. Duke also operates the Catawba and Oconee plants in upstate South Carolina and is building the William Lee plant near Columbia.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) evaluators require a full-scale “exercise” every two years on the readiness of emergency management personnel at all levels of government, Yaussy said.

Mike Sprayberry, state director of emergency management -- still busy with the aftermath of last weekend’s deadly tornadoes -- says a nuclear incident would be “a Type 3 disaster” in the state’s scheme of things, the most serious class of emergency.

A Type 3 would be a widespread, catastrophic disaster devastating numerous counties, regions or even states, like last Saturday’s tornadoes or Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 in eastern North Carolina.

Federal funds from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) would account for 75-90 percent of the costs for recovery with state and local governments covering the remaining share. A complete set of response criteria, Sprayberry says, is set out in some detail in written emergency plans.

Type 2 and Type 1 emergencies are defined as incidents covering smaller geographic areas, each with their own written response criteria for government officials.

Other disasters of more concern

To date, the biggest disasters in the western Piedmont have all been the results of nature—storms in 1916 and 1940 that flooded the Catawba River and its tributaries and, Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which saw 90-mph winds 300 miles inland from Charleston, SC, where it came ashore.

Kenneth Teague, assistant emergency management coordinator in Caldwell County, says counties more remote from the nuclear plants “have been trained by the NRC for radiation incidents,” too.

But last weekend’s violent weather is what has tested the incident management readiness in counties with no nukes.

“We had six inches of rain, and the Johns River crested at 10½ feet,” Teague said. “We had homes damaged by landslides and falling trees, 50 campers floating in the flooded river, and we pulled 17 people out of the water.”

“But we’re prepared to do what we need to do if there’s a nuclear incident.”

Burke County Emergency Services Director Randy Price said, “Our primary function in a nuclear event is going to be in a supportive role for those counties directly in the 10-mile NRC planning area.”

“All North Carolina counties have a mutual aid covenant to assist each other in any kind of emergency. We would probably send people or equipment that might be requested by counties subject to the biggest nuclear threat.”

Price adds that Duke Energy “has always been very good to work with in any kind of emergency that might involve them, and North and South Carolina are two of the best prepared of all the states.”

Iredell County emergency management and communications director David Martin says he’s dealt with McGuire and Duke Energy since 1987, and he’s “very confident that we have safeguards and plans in place to protect our citizens.”

“All of our counties function well together in training, planning and testing for nuclear possibilities, along with Duke Energy,” he said “but he’s much more concerned with possible highway incidents.”

“Iredell County is criss-crossed by two major interstate highways that stay very busy with big trucks hauling some very bad stuff (hazardous materials) that we don’t want scattered by a big wreck.”

“To put things into perspective, that’s far more likely to happen than any kind of incident at McGuire,” said Martin.

FYI: A “Disaster Recovery Assistance Guide” booklet is available from the N.C. Emergency Management Disaster Recovery Operations Center in Raleigh. Wmail: disasterrecovery@ ncem.org or call 919-715-8000.

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Implements such as a disaster recovery strategy - be ReadWriteWeb

Please visit the Qwest Resource Center for relevant briefs and reports, you better manage you help your Unternehmen.Lesen about the new requirements in the network and what you do need to keep it optimized in this IDC report: network management services: a cost-effective approach to complexity.

The possibility of a natural disaster affecting your business IT infrastructure is very real. You must be ready. In this short overview of Qwest as plan, implement and run a quick recovery strategy if ever replication systems.

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The London clinic PEPs up your disaster recovery plans - InfoSecurity Magazine

The disaster recovery improvements, says the clinic, are part of the unit movement to an interoperable infrastructure and make a data archiving systems by BridgeHead software-plus-a data storage system of BRA MediStore use.

This hard drive based archive, says the clinic, replaced a tape-based system and help improve to release memory resources, as the availability of patient data.

After that staff with the clinic, the migration to a hard drive-based data archiving system the IT Department to back up all data of the unit every six hours, rather than once per day, as in the old band-based platform to enable.

Furthermore, says the clinic, in contrast to generic backup, replication and mirroring, tools, the transition to a hard drive-based archiving system means that the MediTech database is properly closed before the backup.

Quiesce is the process of which stop or slow down the rate of data transactions before a back-up process, this ensures, that a ' still ' entire picture in an archive, Infosecurity notes is secured.

In the event that a recovery is required, can the closed version of the IT system restored and lead from same point in time at which the backup occurred.

Tony Tomkys, BridgeHead software's Director of sales, said that contains static data remove installation disaster recovery from the primary backup stream and put you in a more secure, cost-effective storage environment.

This environment, he says can be accessed the data from physicians and clinicians when and where it is required, such as secured in the event of a disaster or system failure.

* Mike Roberts, IT Director at the London clinic, is giving a presentation: "data free at the point of need" on the BCS HealthCare 2011 Conference in Birmingham (Thursday) by tomorrow afternoon.

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4 Steps to prepare for a Katastrophe--what every manager should - know Wall-Street - & technology

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Disaster recovery is often viewed as the need for backup systems to safeguard an organization's data. Here's a little hint for the survival of your company: It's not just about the data.

The IT and data elements of disaster preparedness are critical components to overall preparedness. In today's technological and global environment, organizations rely heavily on access to their data, 24/7, and any interruption of that access can be catastrophic to the organization. And increasingly, this data not only is for internal use, but also for use by business partners, vendors and customers. The availability of this information literally may mean the difference between a business's survival and demise; it can reduce the impact of the disaster and shorten the recovery time.

In the information-hungry world we live in, reducing vulnerabilities of data access can impact an organization's ability to respond and the community's ability to recover. Yet according to a 2004 survey by AT&T Corp. and the International Association of Emergency Managers, nearly one-third of U.S. companies do not have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place. Large-scale disasters expose the quantity of organizations that are unprepared, while demonstrating just how damaging that lack of preparation can be.

The tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, and other major disasters have placed business continuity planning and disaster recovery in the spotlight. But it is important to note that localized disasters such as fire, and even brief disruptions such as fiber cuts, can be equally damaging. A simple Internet virus or worm spread over a single laptop can bring your operations to a grinding halt.

Industry standards and regulations, such as HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley, also act as drivers for implementing solutions. These regulations are designed to protect organizations by enforcing the implementation of BCP plans.

During a catastrophic event, many organizations are forced to put their BCP and IT disaster recovery infrastructure into action. Many more organizations, however, find that the lack of a plan or failover capabilities makes an already difficult task insurmountable. In a hopeless situation, the presence of a detailed BCP plan can create hope.

While this type of safeguard is absolutely a necessity to protect valuable data and reduce the amount of time your organization will need to recover from an incident, this is only part of the solution. A true disaster plan goes far beyond backup servers and drives.

Start With the Planning Process

Again, it's not just about the data. When disaster strikes, what plan does your organization have in place to communicate, both internally and externally? How will your organization ensure it can get your personnel to your hot site? An IT disaster recovery plan is only a small part of an overall business continuity plan. The most important aspects of an effective disaster recovery is planning and training, which both need to be done far ahead of the event. The planning process is more important than the plan itself.

General Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are useless; planning is everything." Planning across the board has fallen on the shoulders of one or two people within an organization. After months of writing the company's disaster plan, they distribute the document to all departments, where it sits on bookshelves collecting dust. The next time the plan is looked at is when the disaster strikes. In this scenario, the plan is destined to fail. But firms can avoid this fate.

Step 1: Involve Everyone.

Disaster planning must involve all stakeholders in the process. Just as data recovery takes into consideration different priorities and timeframes for bringing systems back online, different priorities and timelines exist for bringing services back to a pre-disaster level. Additionally, it is critically important for government, private industry and community organizations to plan together, as there is a reliance on each other for components of response and recovery.

During a widespread disaster such as a hurricane, all stakeholders will be in harsh competition for the same limited supplies and resources, including food, water, computers and clean-up services. The impact of the disaster, such as in New Orleans and Haiti, may be so widespread that local relocation may not be an option. Transportation (and fuel) options may be limited or nonexistent for days or weeks depending on the disaster. All organizations must work together to survive the event.

Step 2: Plan for the Worst-Case Scenario.

While you can't plan for every contingency when developing your plan, consider not only your organization's vulnerabilities, which can include location, security threats, etc., but also your company's capabilities. Once you have determined the most likely disasters to affect your organization and the impacts on your organization, the plan must be grounded in reality. When you write your plan, consider the capabilities and resources that exist today -- not what you are planning toward or will eventually purchase.

That's not to say that you shouldn't build remediation steps into the plan. Determine what resources will be needed to respond and recover based on the threat and vulnerability analysis. If they don't exist, the list will serve as a road map for strategic and budgetary planning, or at least indicate to senior leadership and shareholders what will be required at the time of the disaster. Set expectations in advance of the disaster.

Step 3: Train and Exercise the Plan.

Even if the plan is developed with the input of all stakeholders, the planning process is still not complete. The plan is only good if every employee (from the receptionist to the CEO) is aware of the plan and how to use it. One of the most critical steps in the planning process is to test the plan. Short of an actual disaster, the easiest and most efficient way to test a plan is through a training exercise.

An exercise serves as the "final exam" at the end of a planning cycle, fosters communication between business units, trains users on the employment of a plan and their role in a disaster, and provides a "no-fault" environment to identify gaps. The time to find out if the plan will work is not when people are standing in a pile of rubble. Having the plan fail during the exercise is actually a good thing, as long as changes are immediately made, updates are communicated, employees are made aware, and the plan remains a dynamic work in progress.

Step 4: Putting It All Together (Don't Forget the People).

The plan is developed, personnel are trained and the plan has been tested. Then a disaster strikes and the plan still fails. Some plans have ignored or forgotten the most important aspect of the disaster planning process: All disasters affect people. Disasters leave victims in their wakes, and some of these victims may be the very personnel organizations were counting on for response and recovery. If the plan hasn't considered employees' personal and family needs during and after a disaster, they will not be there for the organization when disaster strikes.

If there is advanced notice of the disaster, such as a hurricane or blizzard, allow time for your employees to address protection of their families and property. Once all is safe on the home front, they are more likely to be available for their employers. After Hurricane Andrew struck south Florida, firefighters and police in Homestead walked off the job or never showed up for work because their homes were damaged; their lives were in chaos. Once city officials brought in crews to assist in the cleanup and temporary repair of their homes, they felt secure enough to return to duty.

Also take into consideration the hardship on a family if you relocate your business operation out of the area. Your plan will only work if every member of your response team is familiar with it and if post-disaster expectations and roles are clearly defined.

Disaster planning is really about the process and less about the technology for disaster recovery. The plan should serve as the framework and general direction to follow, but it cannot take into account every scenario or contingency. There is no way to train for all disasters.

However, having a strong core plan with policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to guide management and employees during a disaster will ensure your organization's survival. The disaster plan does not tell you how to do your job, but rather how to do your job in a compressed timeframe, under stress, and possibly without all of your organization's resources in place.

About the Author: Adam Montella is the VP for homeland security and emergency management for Animus Solutions, a management consulting and technology services company. He has more than 25 years of direct homeland security and emergency management experience in government and private industry. Montella most recently was appointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) National Advisory Council's (NAC) Public Engagement & Mission Support Subcommittee and the National Response Framework Working Group.

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Japan Cabinet approves disaster recovery budget - Straits Times

Tokyo - the Japanese Cabinet on Friday approved a supplementary budget 4 trillion yen (S $60 billion) for the reconstruction of the areas of last month's earthquake and tsunami, local media said.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan Cabinet plans submit the budget Parliament on 28 April, with the aim, by 2 may with the expected support of the opposition, passed the upper house controlled.

It was the first extra budget of the Government approved, since the disaster North Eastern Japan, so that met more than 27,000 people dead or missing and paralyzing nuclear reactors. --AFP

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Disaster recovery: It is more than a plan - it is a process - TechNewsWorld

TechNewsWorld
04/16/11 5:00 AM PT

The most important aspects of an effective disaster recovery is planning and training, which both need to be done far ahead of the event. The planning process is more important than the plan itself. Having a strong plan with policies and standard operating procedures will ensure your organization's survival.

Disaster recovery is a term often used in Information Technology (IT) circles to describe the necessity for backup technology systems to safeguard an organization's data.

While this type of safeguard is absolutely a necessity to protect valuable data, and also reduce the amount of time your organization will need to recover from an incident, a true disaster plan goes far beyond backup servers and drives.

For example, when disaster strikes, what plan does your organization have in place to communicate, both internally and externally? How will your organization ensure it can get your personnel to your hot site? An IT disaster recovery plan is only a small part of an overall business cntinuity plan (BCP), continuity of operations plan (COOP), or comprehensive emergency management plan (CEMP).

The most important aspects of an effective disaster recovery is planning and training, which both need to be done far ahead of the event. The planning process is more important than the plan itself. 

Every organization, at some point in time, will face a disaster, whether it's a power outage, data center meltdown or a major hurricane.

In order to efficiently respond, there are some key processes that must be implemented throughout an organization.

Develop a set of procedures for each disaster scenario. Some key questions to ask: What is the chain of command and lines of succession? How is evacuation handled, if necessary? What about accountability for our employees, on-site vendors and visitors? What's the fallback procedure? If communications are completely down, what actions can be taken without any authorization from management? What are the automatic triggers to act?

Each set of procedures should include:

Methods of contact and communication. This should include multiple methods for the entire enterprise.Determine the chain of command.Designate disaster authorities.List of your alternative works spaces including primary base of command/operations.Data backup: This should include a detailed description on how data is backed up normally (day-to-day) and where it can be found and "turned on" for the company in an event of an emergency. In addition, there should be emergency back-up instructions in the case of evacuation or the like.What/where vital equipment and supplies are to keep running your business. What are the mission critical functions of the organization?

Appoint a planning group comprised of the stakeholder departments and programs within your organization to take ownership of the plan and its components. There should also be an operational component that will have personnel responsible for each aspect of the plan when the plan is activated.

This component also needs redundancy built in. For example, designate several personnel who will oversee employee communication, and several that are responsible for customer  communication. When developing your plan, consider your organization's vulnerabilities, which can include location, security threats, etc. Your disaster plan should include:

Redundancy: This is extremely important to data centers as they contain the lifeblood of many organizations. This means that there are backup systems and an alternative means of communications.Evacuation plans: The most important resource to any organization is its people and their knowledge. It's important to get everyone out of harm's way and working in a safe environment. Make certain that your key business functions can/will be moved with answers as to where and/or how. How do people keep working? It is imperative your disaster plan speaks to how people can access information or services in the wake of a disaster.Communications: A vital element in any disaster/contingency plan is communications. As with any issue that arises in an enterprise, communicating with the organization, customers, prospects, partners and other audiences about what is happening, why it's happening and when they can expect to be back "online" will help stem general irritation, rumors and the like. Having a secure portal for employees can allow a company to communicate effectively and efficiently to employees to convey expectations i.e. report/don't report to work/work remotely/report to designated offsite location(s).

Having a solid plan in place before disaster strikes is only the first step in proper preparedness. In order for it to work during the event, it needs to be tested for prior to an event. Testing must have the participation of the entire organization.

Testing should also be done frequently to address plan, system, personnel and organizational changes. An effective testing program should be done at least semiannually. The challenge with this portion of preparedness is not only finding the time to effectively test the plan, but also motivating employees to participate fully on top of their day to day work demands. It is recommended that an education and communications program include real-life scenarios. There is no reason why the program can't incorporate some fun into it as well, so it's seen not as an obligation, but as a break from work!

Aside from testing systems, "Rehearsals" or role-playing should be part of the program as well. As part of this program, there are announced rehearsals. However, there are also unannounced exercises/drills that should always be promoted as a test of the plan. You want to find gaps and shortfalls in your plan so that when a real disaster occurs you are better able to deal with the incident, even if the exact scenario does not unfold. If the exercise is announced, care should be taken to keep the scenario from the players, and have some unplanned events occur during the exercise (i.e. physical, emotional or psychological unavailability of key personnel/leadership).

Disaster planning is really about the process and less about the technology for disaster recovery. The plan should serve as the framework and general direction to follow but, as previously noted, cannot take into account every scenario or contingency. There is no way to train for all disasters.

However, having a strong, all-hazards based core plan with policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to guide management and employees during a disaster will ensure your organization's survival. The disaster plan does not tell you how to do your job, but rather how to do your job in a compressed timeframe, under stress, and possibly without all your organizations resources in place. 

Animus Vice President of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Adam Montella is vice president of homeland security and emergency management at Animus.
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2 Smart Backup Apps Show You the Way to Go Home
September 01, 2010
The sudden loss of PC data can be a gut-wrenching experience, but it can also be easily avoided by proper use of automatic backup software. Linux users have several options at their disposal, two of which are Keep and Back In Time. They both do basically the same thing, and they do it well, though they differ slightly in interface styling.

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