As your business continuity planners work on their 2010 projects, you may be facing an organizational decision soon regarding whether or not you will move to the current “Cloud Computing” environment.

To help your teams prepare for that situation, you should read a recent article posted on the Network Computing website.  In this article, written by Satish Joshi, and as one of the very first considerations for a company to review, he goes on to state,

“It is therefore of paramount importance to decide what exactly you are trying to do by ‘moving computing into the cloud.’ The computing cloud can be viewed at three different levels of abstraction:

• At the bottom level, the cloud is simply a virtualized data center that offers you variable capacity for computing, storage, communications etc
• At the middle level, the cloud is a whole platform including the middleware (apps servers, ESB, etc) and a complete application development environment
• At the top level, the cloud actually provides complete business process functionality with variable capacity and service levels on demand. Your roadmap and cost benefit equations will be completely different depending which layers you wish to utilize.”

Click here to read more about this current topic so relevant to the needs of today’s business continuity and risk management team members.

Certainly, security professionals must be totally capable of evaluating risk, but, more importantly, in any organization, it is becoming more necessary to communicate that risk to management in a way that gets a buy-in and support for truly being able to mitigate that risk for the organization.

With that in mind, we suggest you read a recent article published in Dark Reading, and authored by Tim Wilson.  Much of the material in the article comes from a series of speakers and presentation made at the recent CSI Annual Conference - 2009 .

Read the full article.

Business Continuity Planning and those related Information Security Projects for most organizations have often been strategies and activities executed as a kind of an insurance policy to cover potential disasters that might happen to that organization.  By having a business continuity strategy or plan in place, management aims to provide mitigation and hopefully, even prevention, of  those problems – both internal and external —  affecting the business in a negative way. 

In an article written by Ian Masters,  and recently posted on the IT BusinessEdge blog, a point is made that looking forward, organizations are demanding more from their business continuity investments.  In other words, business continuity planning efforts along with business continuity software investments must have an additional ROI now presented to management — it is no longer enough to be simply an insurance policy against something going wrong.

Read this article for more information about this growing business continuity requirement trend.