Thrive Technology Solutions http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com The trusted technical advisor your business needs to thrive. Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:10:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 DR Planning: Risk Analysis http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/2010/06/dr-planning-risk-analysis/ http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/2010/06/dr-planning-risk-analysis/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:35:59 +0000 Thrive http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/?p=144 The first step in drafting a disaster recovery plan is conducting a thorough risk analysis of your computer systems. List all the possible risks that threaten system uptime and evaluate how imminent they are in your particular IT shop. Anything that can cause a system outage is a threat, from relatively common manmade threats like virus attacks and accidental data deletions to more rare natural threats like floods and fires. Determine which of your threats are the most likely to occur and prioritize them using a simple system: rank each threat in two important categories, probability and impact. In each category, rate the risks as low, medium, or high.

For example, a small Internet company (less than 50 employees) located in California could rate an earthquake threat as medium probability and high impact, while the threat of utility failure due to a power outage could rate high probability and high impact. So in this company’s risk analysis, a power outage would be a higher risk than an earthquake and would therefore be a higher priority in the disaster recovery plan.

]]> http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/2010/06/dr-planning-risk-analysis/feed/ 0 Patch management for virtualized servers http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/2010/06/patch-management-for-virtualized-servers/ http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/2010/06/patch-management-for-virtualized-servers/#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:35:17 +0000 Thrive http://www.thrivetechnologysolutions.com/?p=141 Patch management of virtualized servers isn’t all that different with regular servers because each virtual operating system is its own independent virtual hard drive.  You still need a patch management system that patches all of your servers, but there may be interesting developments in the future where you may be able to patch multiple operating systems at the same time if they share some common operating system or application binaries.  Ideally, you would be able to assign a patch level to an individual or a group of similar servers.  For now, you will need to patch virtual operating systems as you would any other system, but there will be some innovations in the virtualization sector that you won’t be able to do with physical servers.

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