Disaster Survival Guide for Business Communications Networks

The events of September 11, 2001, were wake up calls, in more ways than one. Organizations have begun to have a more focused approach to disaster planning. But in today's perilous climate which not only includes terrorist attacks, but also the usual never-ending onslaught of hackers, crackers, computer viruses, "tele-thieves," earthquakes, fires, floods, lightning strikes, and other disasters, assuring the survivability of your organization is more challenging than ever before.

This book is written specifically for IT system administrators and telecom managers who want to protect their organization's increasingly complicated and diverse telecom and datacom networks, as well as the telephone systems, Internet sites, computers, and data-laden storage devices attached to them.

This unique guide says that managers must take a new approach in protecting their assets. Instead of just implementing monitoring and detection measures with immediate intervention to combat disasters and ensure business continuity, managers should extend and intensify their security planning phase, reducing the possible magnitude of catastrophic incidents in advance by re-engineering their business to achieve a distributed, decentralized, and hardened organization. This can be done using the latest in communications technology (virtual private networks, conferencing technology, and the Internet) as well as networking and managing a new generation of the traditional "uptime" technologies (fault tolerant computer telephony, convergence, and power supply systems).

With such a strategy, network and system administrators can now defend not just their telecom, information, and computing assets to the fullest extent possible, but can equally safeguard their most important asset - their employees.

And whether it's identifying how hackers and crackers find vulnerabilities in your system, how unnoticeable levels of static electricity can shorten the life of electronic components, or how a centralized workforce can cripple recovery efforts, this book examines the full range of possible security and infrastructure weaknesses that can threaten a business, then helps you formulate and execute commonsense practices to counter them.

Whatever your role in preserving your organization's operating functionality, network infrastructure, and data integrity, this book is a "must have" you'll find yourself referring to time and again

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 Disasters Large and Small

Chapter 2 Conferencing Technology - Addressing the Fear Factor

Chapter 3 Fault-Tolerant Computing

Chapter 4 Data Management and Storage Technology

Chapter 5 Power Protection

Chapter 6 Wireless - Staying Connected

Chapter 7 Security

Chapter 8 VPNs Put Employees Virtually Anywhere

Chapter 9 Telework

Chapter 10 Devising a Master Plan

Glossary

Index of Sidebars

Index of Graphics