Continuity of Operations & the UIUFederal Government Adopts UIU to Support Operational Continuity
So begins If, a poem penned in 1895 by Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. And so begins one of the earliest references to what organizations today describe more prosaically as COOP or continuity of operations planning. A series of disasters in recent years - for example, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the atrocities of 9/11, and the ravages of Hurricane Katrina - have brought this acronym into common currency. Continuity of operations has become a concern for public and private organizations alike. But federal, state, and local government institutions - whose raison d'être is to facilitate functional society - bear greatest responsibility for keeping their heads when all around are losing theirs. "Governmentwide," writes R. Eric Petersen, analyst for the Congressional Research Service, "COOP planning is critical because much of the recovery from an incident, which might include the maintenance of civil authority and infrastructure repair among other recovery activities, presumes the existence of an ongoing, functional government to fund, support, and oversee actions [immediately after the incident]." 1 Today's federal, state, and local government agencies manage more data than any enterprise in history. And so the IT systems that store and process this data have become critical to society's socioeconomic vitality. Responsibility to ensure their continued operability in the face of every conceivable - and, indeed, inconceivable - disaster is accordingly immense. Fortunately, COOP has advanced in recent years to combine a multiplicity of approaches that support such continuity. These include the back up and replication of data in remote locations, deployment of information management software, cloning applications to image PCs for subsequent installation on alternative hardware platforms, and contracting with third parties to provide fixed or mobile IT host facilities in the event an agency's offices became inaccessible. These advances notwithstanding, even adherence to all the above could still render an organization vulnerable to hours, days, or, in some cases, weeks of inoperability in the wake of an incident. The Best Laid Plans Consider: It starts out as a typical Monday morning for staff at the regional office of a federal government agency. This, however, won't be an ordinary week for the office's four-hundred and fifty staff. Shortly after 10 am, more than a dozen workers on the third floor report symptoms of headache, nausea, and fever. Some 65 million Americans in seven states depend on this office for essential services. Nevertheless, the agency's Director, fearing for the safety of her staff, orders an evacuation of the building. From a continuity of operations perspective, the situation could be worse. The database and other servers are replicated at a remote location and recently created Images of the agency's most important PC configurations are in a nearby government warehouse. The agency's far-sighted COOP planners also signed a contract last year for rapid deployment of two-hundred workstations - an on-demand, mobile command center - to support continuity of operations within four hours of an evacuation event. It's now 2 pm. The mobile facility is already in situ, and agency personnel are standing by to resume service. They'll take their posts just as soon as the IT staff can install the agency's Images - which number almost twenty in light of the disparate PCs in use at the now-evacuated building - on the mobile facility's two-hundred workstations. However, there's a problem: None of the Images will readily port to the new workstations because of incompatibilities between the hardware from which the Images were cloned and the third-party hardware in the mobile facility. In fact, the agency's IT managers will need at least another six hours before any of the PCs are formatted, and probably another two or three days before even half of them are in service. That's two or three days too late for the 65 million clients who use this agency. Now its Director finds herself battling not only a potential public health disaster but also an unanticipated administrative crisis. UIU Accelerates Post-Incident Recovery A solution now exists to the problem that precipitated this crisis. Recently adopted by the U.S. federal government, it's the Universal Imaging Utility. This remarkable innovation ensures that a master Image created via any cloning application (Ghost, Altiris, Novell ZENworks, etc.) will deploy to any business-class PC, regardless of make, model, processor, or configuration. The UIU works by preparing a master PC (a fully configured platform that the User wishes to clone) prior to executing cloning software. Specifically, the UIU installs on this master an extensive database of drivers. In this way, the Image created by the cloning software will deploy to virtually any PC. Key to this advance is the UIU's driver database, which contains drivers for more than 35,000 hardware components from systems integrators and OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Sony, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and 3Com. Despite the need to accommodate such a comprehensive suite of drivers, the database is small enough to fit comfortably on a single CD. Moreover, it continuously updates its stock of drivers, minimizing the chance that an Image will ever lack the requisite drivers for a host PC. Thanks to the UIU, IT professionals can now install Images on new or dissimilar hardware platforms in as little as thirty minutes. Organizations consequently need barely skip a beat under even the most catastrophic circumstances. But the benefits of universal Imaging extend well beyond incident recovery. The UIU adds immediate value to the daily routines of an IT department. For example, it reduces the number of Images the department need manage to just one. And its labor savings render practicable much more frequent Imaging, which means application updates and operating system patches - essential to protecting against security incursions - can undergo deployment as often as weekly. Previous to the UIU, a schedule of quarterly or semi-annual updates was more typical in most organizations. Furthermore, the cumulatively substantial time savings enabled by the UIU allow IT professionals to apply their expertise to strategic tasks that advance the organization's mission rather than operational tasks like downloading drivers and managing Image files. And the new reality of a single master Image significantly eases compliance with security policies, software licensing, and regulatory requirements. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, for example, dictates IT-related controls to monitor financial reporting. Compliance to these regulations becomes orders of magnitude easier when managing one universal Image. With these benefits in mind, the federal government has become one of the Universal Imaging Utility's most enthusiastic adopters. Meanwhile, Big Bang and Binary Research International - partners in the development and distribution of this ground-breaking technology - are proud of their contribution to making all organizations, public and private, better prepared for when an ordinary Monday morning next takes an unexpected turn. About the Universal Imaging Utility The UIU is developed by Big Bang LLC, a Milwaukee, WI-based software training, consulting and development company and pioneer of hardware-independent imaging. Big Bang has partnered with Binary Research International, Inc., of Glendale, WI and its English subsidiary - Binary Resource (UK) Ltd. Binary, a developer and provider of IT Training and a Distributor of software, is best known as being part of the company that developed Ghost, the world's first software cloning utility. Learn more about Big Bang on the web at www.UIUforYou.com.
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