Business Continuity Planning and Articles, Papers, and Reports

"Students arriving on campus this semester are getting a new task added to their to-do lists: Log onto "Who I Am" and provide emergency contact information.

The new service is the latest upgrade to Cornell's ongoing emergency planning effort. Since the late 1990s, well before 9/11 and recent U.S. campus shootings, Cornell has had a team of officials and responders dedicated to planning for events most people don't want to think about."

The Governor's Task Force on Campus Safety is focused on ensuring the safety of college campuses across Wisconsin. At the direction of Governor Jim Doyle, the Task Force is reviewing and compiling criteria for developing best practices from universities, colleges, and other higher education institutions in Wisconsin and across the nation. This information will be submitted to the governor and will serve as a resource for college administrators, law enforcement officers, and emergency preparedness officials.

The annual Campus Computing Survey focuses on IT security and crisis management, finding gaps in preparation but fewer attacks on networks.

This ECAR research bulletin suggests a framework to provide resiliency in higher education by placing such considerations up front in the evaluation, selection, and design of information technology (IT) services and building them into the business practices of the institution. Resiliency is the product of technology, people, and processes that minimize the impact of an event and make transparent that which would otherwise adversely disrupt the normal operation of services for students, faculty, or staff.

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the benefits of multi-institutional development of a ubiquitously needed IT service. By leveraging emerging technology, procurement opportunities, and internal resources, the University of California Office of the President and University of California, San Diego were able to develop a complex disaster recovery solution involving the joint hosting and comprehensive mirroring of each location’s mainframe and non-mainframe computing environments.

he University of Maryland University College and Sloan-C recently held a workshop on academic continuity and emergency management at UMUC on June 27, 2007. Click on the link below to access a brief report which describes the workshop. Includes preliminary findings, general conclusions, recommendations, agenda, and participant list.

Backup tapes, hot sites, annual tests -- the elements of yesterday's disaster recovery planning may lead to a dead end today. Do you know where your applications are?

This ECAR research bulletin addresses a unique strength of higher education: its commitment to sharing ideas and promoting open access to knowledge. These values shape IT in higher education as well, as evidenced by many high-profile collaborations such as the Internet, Internet2, and open or community source applications such as Sakai and Kuali. Institutions work with one another on a broad range of projects and services including wide area networking, shared data centers, or disaster recovery. Some institutions share staff, while others outsource their IT operation to a fellow institution. Using findings from the 2007 ECAR study on IT collaboration, this bulletin explores the challenges that suggest that collaboration may become an even more prevalent strategy in the future.

This research bulletin discusses the advantages, benefits, and costs of business continuity certification. Based on data from the 2007 ECAR study of business continuity in higher education, the Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI) International, journals, presentations, and interviews with business continuity professionals, the bulletin reviews the roles of certified professionals and the processes for obtaining and maintaining certification.

The authors discuss the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery planning but stress that people in each department need to understand how important their roles are to the restoring of services, managing the crisis, and returning to normal operations.