Information Technology News
July 24th, 2010
Business continuity planning becomes more critical
The more your business relies on its IT systems, the more you need to consider how unexpected disruptions might affect your business. These disruptions could come in many forms, from fire and floods to theft or malicious attacks on your systems, such as viruses or hacking.
Business continuity planning improves your business' ability to react to such disruptions. It describes how you will restart your operations in order to meet your business-critical requirements.
The business continuity template can be used for any sized enterprise. The Disaster Recovery template and supporting material have been updated to be ISO 27000, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA compliant. The Template explains the importance of business continuity plans to the success of your business, and how best to develop them.
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July 13th, 2010
Security demands CIOs to adapt as new threats appear
It is not easy to keep an enterprise successful and secure these
days. Businesses all over the world are faced with a host of new challenges: an
unsteady economy, growing competition, volatile global markets, shrinking
budgets, and consumer uncertainty. Overworked IT departments are not only
expected to respond to the demands of anxious business teams, theyre also
responsible for securing the organization and its valuable data against a raft
of sophisticated new threats they have never seen before; proving their
processes are internally and externally compliant; and being fiscally
responsible.
The security policies and procedures template by Janco is the perfect solution. It helps CIOs and IT Managers create the proper security environment.
Because of the way security has evolved over the years, it is rarely looked upon or "fulfilled the role" as a strategic business enabler. Some see it as an inescapable and often costly necessity. The approach to security is generally driven by the latest threats; it is reactive rather than proactive, tactical rather than strategic.
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June 22nd, 2010
H-1B rule may help US IT job market
Job Market maybe helped by a proposed new rule. A rule known as the 50/50 rule in a piece of 2009 Senate legislation (as well as a clause in the House in the Comprehensive Immigration Reform ASAP Act of 2009) seeks to balance out the numbers of foreign workers and U.S. workers in companies that employ more than 50 U.S.-based employees. If a company is using H-1B or L-1 visa workers or both, the legislation would limit the number of those workers to no more than 50 percent of the company's U.S.-based workforce. more information
June 18th, 2010
Disaster Planning Takes Good Staff
Good business continuity planning
needs to take a broad view, embracing people, human behavior, customers and
other factors that lie outside the data center. It is also important to secure
the vision and endorsement of executive management. A properly funded,
well-prioritized business continuity plan, combined with a regular program of
testing and recovery drills, will help to safeguard the organization. Read this
white paper to understand the key elements of a successful business continuity
plan, see how to develop a plan that clarifies what is critical, and set
specific recovery requirements.
June 10th, 2010
Disaster Recovery is Area of Cost Cutting Focus
Disaster Recovery (DR) is a tough game. It's a
critical component of IT and risk mitigation strategies, and compounded in
difficulty by ever growing data volumes, distributed computing, and new
technologies. Unfortunately, DR is often one of the first line items hit by
budget cuts. How can you get creative in protecting more data, recovering more
swiftly, but also saving some money at the same time?
According to an AT&T Survey of 100 Chicago firms (revenues <$10M), 81 have DR plans, but only 43% have fully tested their plans within the last 12 months and 12% admitted they have never tested their business continuity plans.
Next to personnel, data is your most irreplaceable asset. Networks, application hosting platforms, and end user computing environments can be replaced quickly. However, without your customer lists, product catalogs, inventory, financial records, and other operational data your business cannot recover.
A disaster recovery is a response to a declared disaster or a regional disaster. It is the restoration or recovery of an entire Agent computer. A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is to deal with potential disasters. Just as a disaster is an event that makes the continuation of normal functions impossible, a disaster recovery plan consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized, and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions. Typically, disaster recovery planning involves an analysis of business processes and continuity needs; it may also include a significant focus on disaster prevention.
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May 27th, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning is Required for Business Continuity Planning
Disaster Recovery Plans are part of a larger, more extensive planning process known as Business Continuity Planning. Disaster Recovery plans should be tested frequently so that the as many individuals as possible are familiar with the specific actions they will need to take when a disaster occurs. Disaster Recovery plans must also be adaptable and updated frequently, e.g. if new people, a new branch office, or new hardware or software are added to an organization they should promptly be incorporated into the organization's disaster recovery plan. Enterprises must consider all these facets of their organization as well as update and practice their plan if they want to maximize their recovery after a disaster.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are the process an organization uses to recover access to their enterprise operations; software, data, and/or hardware that are needed to resume the performance of normal, critical business functions after the event of either a natural disaster or a disaster caused by humans. While Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, or DRPs & BCPs, often focus on bridging the gap where data, software, or hardware have been damaged or lost, one cannot forget the vital element of work force that composes much of any organization. A building fire might predominantly affect vital data storage; whereas a pandemic or epidemic illness is more likely to have an effect on staffing. Both types of disaster need to be considered when creating a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. Thus, enterprises should include in their DRPs & BCPs contingencies for how they will cope with the sudden and/or unexpected loss of key personnel as well as how to recover their data.
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May 26th, 2010
2010 Productivity Award Give to eJobDescription.com
The IT Productivity Center (ITPC) has just awarded ejobdescription.com with its prestigious 2010 Productivity Award for the electronic Internet and IT Job Descriptions HandiGuide. The 2010 awards competition attracted 131 nominations for innovations and productivity improvements worth $40 million in cost savings, cost avoidances and increased revenue for the IT function of enterprises of all sizes.
The awardees electronic book met all of ITPCs criteria for improved
productivity, as it is electronically based and is content rich. Not only
does it include 231 fully ADA and ISO compliant IT job descriptions, it also
contains a job progression matrix, sample organizational charts, set of best
practices for screening resumes and phone screening, process for hiring and
motivation employees, job evaluation questionnaires, and logs to be used in the
hiring process.
In providing the award the CEO of the IT Productivity Center
said, We have reviewed the job descriptions that are included in the HandiGuide
and find them as complete and update as any that we have seen. They
added, The best practices included are what really put this product over the
top for http://www.ejobdescription.com.
Every CIO and IT Manager should strive to achieve the processes contained within
the HandiGuide.
The 2010 Productivity Award allows its recipients to the award logo on their web site as well as including it on any materials that that received the award.
In order to qualify for this award the product or service is required to Soar like and eagle as the logo depicts. The center is constantly looking for enterprises that seek to achieve this goal. Nominations are accepted from enterprises that can show measurable productivity improvements from the products or services that they nominate.
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