The past week and a half have brought us the trifecta of business continuity / disaster recovery (BC/DR) stories: Hurricane Irene, the San Diego blackout, and the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I’ll try not to belabor the point – stuff happens, and business need to be prepared – and instead highlight some of the more important lessons.

Lesson #1 – Disasters happen all the time.

It’s unfortunate that our industry refers to “disaster recovery”. The word disaster sounds like...

In light of the recent weather conditions, I thought I would write up a short take for Journey to the Cloud on Power over Ethernet (PoE).  Over the last decade there have been several variations of PoE – starting with the proprietary (heard this story before) and moving to a standards-based solution.  This doesn’t mean that the confusion has gone away.  

The original standards-based PoE was classified under the 802.3af specification.  These...

I just got done reading a survey report put out by Symantec on the topic of SMB disaster preparedness. It stated what I think most of already know, that something like 50% of small and midsize businesses (SMB) don’t have a disaster plan. This is a terrible state of affairs, and I applaud Symantec for highlighting the issue with the report.

Much less laudable was Symantec’s recommendation for how SMBs can address the gap. As I read, and then re-read the report to be sure, I realized that all the...

There’s a fine story by Jacob Gsoedl over at SearchDisasterRecovery.com called, “Disaster recovery in the cloud explained” that makes for good reading.

Gsoedl provides a good overview of matters. I would like amplify one topic that I think deserves more emphasis than Gsoedl provides – testing.

As one of our customers recently put it to me, “You don’t actually have a DR plan if you...