Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: resilience

Backup Communication Channels

IT Leadership, , , ,

What is the difference between 30 individual soldiers and a platoon? Leadership and the ability to communicate.

The first step in your resilience planning is to ensure that you can still communicate, even when faced with an onslaught of Russian hackers or American government officials.

That could mean an on-premise open source mail server and a basic web server. Every workstation and company smartphone could have a separate open source mail client and web browser preconfigured for those servers.

There are many other options – the paranoid and those with high threat levels might have spare phones running GrapheneOS and Briar, or even establish their own Meshtastic mesh network.

If you don’t have a backup communication channel, you urgently need to establish one. Especially if you are outside the U.S. and depend on U.S. services.

Denmark is Dangerously Unprepared – Are You?

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, , , ,

Denmark is not prepared for IT disasters and attacks. The state auditors have chosen 13 out of the approx. 4,200 public IT systems and looked at their recovery plans and procedures. A few were fairly well prepared, most were not, and one system was completely unprepared for anything to go wrong.

None of the recovery plans were adequately tested, and five systems had not tested their recovery plan at all in the last three years. For outsourced systems, half of the contracts did not require testing the recovery plan (!).

But at least the Danish state has an office that examines these things and issues a report. Who is responsible for evaluating the disaster recovery plans for critical systems in your organization? You cannot leave that to the individual system owners.