Posts Tagged ‘protection’

Conducting a BIA (Business Impact Analysis)

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Yesterday, I touched on the BCM program and I cautioned about holding the IT department responsible for BCM. Lets pause for a while and zoom into why that is the case.

BIAOne of the most important activity in the Business Continuity planning process is the Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Typically, BIA is used to identify, qualify and quantify the exposure and impact of threats to your business.  With these impact analyzed and quantified, forming the output of the BIA, you will then be able to justify the reasons and case for a business continuity plan. In a nut shell, BIA can be used to:

  • Determine the extent to which critical functional and operational dependencies exists within the organization and how important are these functions to the business,
  • Assess the impact of a disruption to identified critical functional area or business operations within the organization,
  • Establish the priorities and sequence in which critical data processing applications and key business functions should be restored.

If the BIA is used to determine critical business functions, then it wouldn’t make sense to just let IT handle this on their own. It needs to involve the business units and the rest of the organization, especially with the Executive Management support.

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Governance beyond Uncertainty

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

I had the privilege to join Sun’s Chief Privacy Officer, who is also our Chief Governance Officer for Cloud Computing, in meetings with some government InfoComm authority folks. The subject of the meetings were Governance for Cloud Computing.

Overall, I thought she did well in covering the key and important points across areas such as legislation / laws and the jurisdictional territories, Standards, data classifications / categories, how to maintain data privacy and security across its lifecycle, IP (Intellectual Property) of third party contents, license rights, policing rights, etc.  The message she brought to the table is that at the end of the day, businesses needs to manage an acceptable equilibrium between gaining the business agility, cost advantages and empowering their business to leverage on available Cloud services, and the acceptable or tolerated level of risks by the business.  It was not an easy subject to talk about (especially in an hour duration).

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How do Dolphins sleep?

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Dolphins

Marine mammals like dolphins breathe just like us. But while humans can breathe even when our conscious mind is asleep, dolphins are equipped with a voluntary respiratory system and therefore must keep part of their brain alert to trigger each breath. To avoid drowning, it is crucial that marine mammals retain control of their blowhole, which is a flap of skin that opens and closes under the dolphin’s voluntary control. Although still a matter of discussion, most researchers feel that in order to breathe, a dolphin must be conscious and alert to recognize that its blowhole is at the surface. So, how does a dolphin sleep?

The bottlenose dolphin sleeps by shutting down only half of its brain, along with the opposite eye. The other half of the brain stays awake at a low level of alertness. This attentive side is used to watch for predators, obstacles and other animals. It also signals when to rise to the surface for a fresh breath of air. After approximately two hours, the animal will reverse this process, resting the active side of the brain and awaking the rested half. This pattern is often called cat-napping.

So, applying the same concept on data center facilities, how do we maintain and service the critical infrastructure components in our data centers without reducing the number of capacity units required to support the data center?

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Controlling water vapor in Data Centers

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

We all know that in the world we live in, water exists in 3 forms – liquid, gas and solid. Water vapor refers to the gas form of water and it is produced from evaporation or boiling of liquid water. Liquid water starts to boil when its vapor pressure reaches its surrounding pressure. Water_vapor_pressureBelow is a graph plotting the relationship of water vapor pressure versus temperature. Note that at the normal boiling point of 100°C, the vapor pressure equals the standard atmospheric pressure of 760 Torr or 101.325 kPa (approximately 7.5 Torr per kPa), and that is where evaporative cooling takes place (water turning into gas form takes a part of the heat with it).  Anyway, enough of boring details…

So, what is the significance of water vapor in the context of data centers? Well, we first need to understand two terms – relative humidity and dew point.

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Fire Triangle

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

195px-Fire_triangle.svg

Data Center facilities, unlike our homes and office buildings, requires a different treatment in terms of protection against fire.

But before we touch on that topic, lets first understand the nature of fire. To do so, lets learn about the fire triangle or combustion triangle. This is the basic foundation for understanding the ingredients necessary for most fires. It has largely been replaced in the industry by the fire tetrahedron, which add further aspects.

The triangle illustrates the rule that in order to ignite and burn, a fire requires three elements: heat, fuel, and an oxidizing agent (usually oxygen) and the fire can be suppressed or extinguished by removing any one of them. Only in the right mixture or combination, will a fire occur.

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