Many small to medium business cannot afford the complex infrastructures that are required to create full-fledged protection mechanisms for business continuity. They try to rely on backup tapes, backup software and offsite vaults, but everyone knows that backups arenÂ’t any good unless they are tested and that takes a lot of time, effort and resources, most SMBs just don't have. That's where the Janco Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Template comes in.

With the template and the electronic forms that it has it is much easier to implement a Cloud solution. Cloud service providers can easily store duplicates of all your data and content, and all for a fraction of the cost it would take to manage the process yourself. Relying on the cloud in this way is the easiest and fastest path to recovery in the event of a situation. Given the maturity of the cloud today, you can safely and securely rely on this environment to protect all of your business assets; in fact, it is the future of business continuity and the core of disaster recovery.

Technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to the 2012-2011 Salary Survey from Dice, a career site for technology and engineering professionals. After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than two percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010.

There was also a jump in both size of average bonuses, up eight percent to $8,769, and the number of technology professionals receiving bonuses: 32 percent in 2011, compared with 29 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009. The industries most likely to pay out bonuses were telecom, hardware, banking, utilities/energy and software. While salaries are on the rise among technology professionals, entry-level salaries continue to be pushed downward, according to the survey. The professionals who generally saw their wages increase were those with 11 or more years of experience in their field. The survey was administered online with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding between September 19 and November 21, 2011, according to Dice.

Business continuity is vital to business success. It can no longer remain the concern of the IT department alone. How do you determine the continuity and recovery requirements of your business to protect against a disaster? How do you identify and integrate critical business and IT priorities into a comprehensive continuity program? Where do you start?

Janco's data center disaster recovery plan for business continuity includes:

• Identification of the business units and operational objectives.
• Identify & inventory and rank assets based on criticality to the business objectives.
• Rank the threats that pose risks to the critical assets.
• Identify the severity of vulnerabilities in the critical assets.
• Prioritize risks by focusing on assets affected by credible disaster threats and existing vulnerabilities.
• Develop strategies that minimize risk of disaster and maximize ROI.

Janco's Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Template directs you in creating data center disaster recovery plans and providing cost estimates to adapt your facility and technology resources for continuous availability:

• Backup and recovery options for your multi-vendor information technology.
• Internal and external disaster recovery site options.
• Recoverability of your critical infrastructure.
• Protection of your critical business processes.

Criminals shifted away from building up botnet armies in favor of launching targeted attacks on specific corporate networks in 2011, according to security researchers.

The overall number of networks and computers hijacked by criminals globally and commandeered into a botnet army has declined each year since 2009, Cisco said in its 2011 state of security report, released Dec. 14. The Global Adversary Resource Market Share Index, which tracks the number of compromised systems, has dropped over the past few years.

Attackers also changed how they distribute malware in 2011, as they realized it could be used for "far more nefarious purposes" than just stealing bank accounts. Malware that is stealthy and "siphoning off" personal information, which can later be sold on underground markets, is potentially a more profitable approach. Facebook spammers took advantage of users' tendency to click on links posted by "friends" to launch clickjacking scams or download malware.

It looks like tablets are going to be a area of focus in 2012 according to Baseline.

With the explosion of technology into every facet of the day-to-day business environment there is a need to define an effective infrastructure to support operating environment; have a strategy for the deployment and technology; and clearly define responsibilities and accountabilities for the use and application of technology.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

To succeed and thrive, today's organizations must create network environments that enable them to continue operations or recover in the shortest possible time.

The BlackBerry may not be dead, but it's dying. New research from Enterprise Management Associates says that 30 percent of  BlackBerry users in companies with more than 10,000 users will move to a different mobile platform in the next year. That would  move Research in Motion's standing in large enterprise into that of a minority OS. Today, 52 percent of users in such  organizations "actively" use a BlackBerry for work purposes, EMA reports; a 30 percent reduction would bring that total to 36 percent.

At a SIM conference for big-company CIOs, more than half had iPhones and about half had BlackBerrys. There were  also a couple Android smartphones in use. (Some CIOs had multiple devices, thus the totals coming to more than 100 percent.) All  but one had an iPad with them. In the last 18 months the shift away from the BlackBerry has been dramatic, going from 100 percent to about 50 percent. And most still using BlackBerrys expected to drop their RIM devices in the next two years.

Disaster recovery plans are impacted by data encryption.  Encryption continues to be the topic on every CIO and IT person's lips nowadays. No one wants to end up in the news as the next victim of a privacy breach or the next company that did not protect its customers' information. If you conduct a news search using the words personal data breach, you will be alarmed at the number of instances where personal information such as social security and credit-card numbers have been exposed to possible theft. In a recent breach, a state government site allowed access to hundreds of thousands of records, including names, addresses, social security numbers and documents with signatures.

Whether it is government agencies, research facilities, banking institutions, credit card processing companies, hospitals - or your company's computers - the risk of compromising private information is very high.  The relationship business has with technology. -- business relies so heavily on technology today, business risk becomes technology dependent. The possibility of litigation is part of business. It has always been a risk of doing business, but because technology and today's business are so intertwined, business risk has a higher threat level. This has prompted many to encrypt workstations and mobile computers in order to protect critical business data.

If you have rolled out encryption, how do you maintain your IT service quality when the hard disk drive fails? How do you plan and prepare for a data loss when the user's computer is encrypted?  These are all issues that should be considered when putting together a data disaster plan. In addition, data recovery, one of the more common missing elements of a disaster recovery plan, should also be factored in because it can serve as the "Hail Mary" attempt when all other options have been exhausted.

IT organizations of all sizes contend with a growing data footprint with more data to manage, protect, and preserve for longer periods of time. Online primary storage, has focus a on fast low latency, reliable access to data while near-line secondary storage has a focus on low cost and high capacity. Long-term data retention requires a combination of ultra-low cost, good performance during storage and retrieval, and reduced footprint in terms of power, cooling, floor-space and economics (PCFE) - also known as a small green footprint - for inactive data.