Information Loss - Be Prepared For Any Disaster

Once again, becoming a successful CIO is not hopeless. Therefore, if you decide to trust this perspective, there will always be matters that you may do around your house. After all, how on earth would they know that?

"You'll miss me when I'm gone" is a phrase I've heard various (older) family members say to me, usually as I roll my eyes at the latest bit of wisdom they've decided to impart. However, it's apt for business IT.

With all of us, two things matter. The first is engaging activities that please us. The second is avoiding activities that cause us pain. So when I say people are moving towards, I mean that they tend to spend most of their time trying to move towards pleasure.

Who's Who? It would be surprising if you knew all your IT service providers; navigating a change is not when you want to be surprised. That's why you need a contact list of all your providers: telephone, data access, security, web site and email hosts, and any managed services. Be sure that you also have copies of all your current service agreements, as well as a clear understanding of what level of service they provide--for example, how long should it take for a response after you call.

Legacy IT Systems that had been created by past projects were another problem. BT was paying to keep 3,000 such systems up and running. Al-Noor had them take a look at what each system was being used to do and in the end they were able to decommission 700 of these systems.

Running backups of your system and data will be the key to making a quick recovery from a data loss disaster. Offsite and onsite recovery systems may be the only thing which keeps your business from going under after a application delivery controllers critical data loss.

IT Support teams across the globe specialise in recovering that all important data. They find files that most people assume have been lost forever. Obviously for a small business owner, this is essential. This could be something as important as their company accounts and could mean that they save hundreds of hours restructuring documents, thanks to the recovery team getting the documents back. These teams have years of experience with similar projects so will be able to advise on the best ways to stop this happening in the future, but also protecting the business when it does happen.

The results of these scans are then passed to the crime syndicate staff programmers for focused and advanced attacks. These programmers are typically in foreign countries where US law Enforcement has limited or no influence.

An example of predicting change and preparing. A large American cosmetic manufacturer read in a scientific journal, an article for a new simplified approach for making a colloidal gel. So they knew that there was a change coming in the base materials they used. Who was going to take this scientific discovery and bring it to their industry and how was it going to impact their industry? Would they be first? They needed to figure out where the leaves were moving to find an indication that this new method had been applied.

Performance management does not have to be difficult, or cumbersome. It is a normal part of day to day management and is a skill all managers need to develop to be effective in their roles.

So what's a CIO (and for that matter an IT section) to do? Everyone loves money; notably business owners. Not only do your IT guys have more and more "stuff" to look after, they desire a broader and wider skill set to manage it.