The Information Technology Group (ITG) of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School led and organized a campus-wide event, in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), to push UCSB’s collective IT capacity to be ready for disasters via a disaster recovery (DR) site and business continuity plans (BCP). The daylong meeting aimed to make the university’s data safer in the light of manmade attacks like the recent Distributed Denial of Service attack that crippled much of the internet for a day or natural disasters like earthquakes. The goal of the day was to leverage a campus DR site to provide – quickly and inexpensively – a blend of DR/BCP for our operations while demonstrating campus collaboration in this area.
“We brought a great group of professionals together from all parts of campus,” says Bill Doering, Director of the Information Technology Group at the Gevirtz School. “This event furthered those efforts and this group will be instrumental in pushing disaster recovery and business continuity plans at UCSB. These developments are critical to the GGSE as well because we see an immediate opportunity to implement mature continuity plans in an economical way due to opportunities CIO, Matt Hall, has presented to IT leaders on campus.”
“Continuity of operations for our research, instruction, and student experience capabilities stands as a critical imperative for UCSB,” says Matthew Hall, Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer. “Bill Doering’s leadership in initiating and leading this important dialog demonstrates how our community comes together to plan the complex technical and process means to move workloads to alternative sites in the event of meteorological, seismic, infrastructure, or civil disruption(s) and thereby allow our operations to continue unimpeded.”
Discussions during the day also featured Jim Caesar, Campus Emergency Manager, who shared his role in emergency preparedness and explained to the group the critical component of sharing information, building relationships, and documenting the process at all levels.
The event also featured the relevant big vendors – Miscrosoft, VMware, Nimble, VEEAM – who presented on the ways their products and services could be of use to the UC Santa Barbara information technology community.