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When Disaster Strikes – Is Your Data Protected and How Quickly Can you Recover?
By Naomi Dillon
From student identification and performance tracking systems to transportation routing and employee evaluation software, public education is increasingly relying on data and technology to help drive big decisions and small.
What’s sometimes forgotten in this equation, however, is the importance of putting as much time in preserving data as in collecting it.
“The reality is the unexpected is something everyone needs to prepare for,” says Keith Krueger, chief executive officer of the Washington D.C.-based Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). “Whether it’s the electricity going out or a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, it’s hard to say firmly what to expect but you need to have a backup plan.”
More precisely, Krueger says, school districts need to have a business continuity plan, a corporate term and practice that school districts are adopting with increasing frequency.
In essence, schools must move from merely preparing for a crisis and think about how it would keep critical operations and communications going through and beyond one. Data and IT protection are a natural part of that planning process.
“Often operational issues like data back-up and infrastructure are overshadowed by technology conversations that focus on classroom resources to directly support teaching and learning because those are more easily understood by board members and administrators” says Ann Flynn, NSBA’s Director of Education Technology. “Given the school board’s role,,. it is critical that board members ask questions to ensure their districts have realistic plans and that CTO’s learn how to communicate those plans in a way that non-techies can understand. Every board should have these discussions before a crisis arises.”
It goes without saying that school districts need to have a backup copies of their data, but of which data and for how long?
“There are two things to consider in data storage and recovery: Do you need to maintain data for historic purposes or day-to-day operations because there are different rules and regulations for each,” says Joe Flach, founder and CEO of the Safe Harbor Consulting, a crisis management, technology recovery and business continuity services firm in Washington state.
Hence, priority number one for school districts is to determine what the laws are regarding what type of data needs to be maintained and over what time span. Your school attorney should be involved in some of the initial conversations about identification of critical components and requirements for historic records.
Other important considerations include how quickly particular data needs to be accessed. Is it a part of critical business operations requiring immediately availability or could key functions continue without it?
This, of course, dovetails into how and where to store data.
“A lot of smaller companies may understand the need to backup data, but they keep it on the same floor space or the same facility, so if a fire or water damage ever occurred they’d lose everything,” Flach says.
By the way, a natural disaster doesn’t have to take your data down. In fact, according to a 2010 survey conducted by Forrester Research and the Disaster Recovery Journal, failures of power, IT hardware, and networks were the top three reasons that businesses declared a disaster or a major business disruption.
Diminishing those risks require backing up data and storing it in a secure, preferably off-site location. And while there are no hard and fast rules regarding how far apart data storage centers and recovery sites need to be, the district’s capabilities, resources, and technology infrastructure will play a large part in that decisions--- as well as, a little common sense.
“We hear a lot from districts that can’t afford to go to a remote storage and are partnering with a neighboring district,” Krueger says. “Obviously, if it’s a district in the Gulf, I wouldn’t pick another district in the Gulf.”
Some districts have gotten around the whole issue of where to store data by moving it to the cloud. You may have heard about cloud computing and more than likely your district is making use of this breakthrough technology.
Indeed, the 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll by CDW found 83 percent of K-12 systems have used at least one cloud-based application and 27 percent have implemented or are maintaining a full-scale cloud computing strategy.
Basically, cloud computing is the consolidation and sharing of computing services like data storage, network servers, and application hosting. The term is a bit of a misnomer because all of that information is actually stored somewhere, just not at your district; eating up your entire server storage. Yet, you have access to it as if it were on campus, thanks to the Internet. There are other issues related to cloud computing like “safe and secure” data and storage cost. We will address those in future issues on the TLN eZine.
Cloud computing is most commonly offered by private vendors. In Illinois, however, it’s the school districts that have banded together to offer the service. Called the IlliniCloud, the consortium began in 2009 in Bloomington Public School District 87, which, like a lot of school districts, had seen its resources dwindle and budget shrink, even as technology demands rose.
“We used to get scared when the curriculum director would come back and say, ‘Hey I just learned about this new program and I want to get it’ because it would take us weeks, sometimes months to implement,” says Jim Peterson, Bloomington’s chief technology officer and the force behind the IlliniCloud.
“The beauty of the cloud is now it takes hours,” he says. And there are other many other marvels of cloud computing that Peterson extols.
Just about anything can reside in the IlliniCloud, including systems to support basic operations like transportation, food services, and human resources. Also residing in the cloud is classroom management and instructional technology like Moodle and Learn 360 and collaboration tools like Big Blue Button and Adobe Connect.
“Everyone is moving toward digital content and it requires more server capacity,” Peterson says. The irony is schools store much of the same kind of data and use many of the same programs, yet with cloud computing and virtualization there is a built-in consolidation feature.
“There’s no reason to store it again and again, which saves the district from having to save it on their hardware; it’s cloud-scale economics,” Peterson says.
Data is saved once on each of three data storage centers located at school districts throughout the state of Illinois and shared through a network the consortium operates.
“So not only is it secure, we can do extremely fast transfers and if one server is nailed by a tornado, we’ve got it in two other places,” Peterson says.
While a natural disaster has oddly enough not stricken Illinois since the volunteer-led consortium began, the IlliniCloud’s data recovery capabilities were put to the test recently when a local district called last year and asked for a backup.
“I don’t what happened, but they called us on a Sunday and said they needed to do a restore, luckily they had been backing everything up into the IlliniCloud and we were able to get them running in minutes,” Peterson says.
The model has obviously appealed to cash-strapped districts in the state, with the consortium estimating it will double the number of districts it serves from just over 200 to 400 by June.
“We’re like selling ice water in a desert here,” Peterson says. “The reason we’re so successful in Illinois is we’re a community of peers. We did not do this top down. When schools work together there’s a trust factor there.”
Peterson’s advice to districts and states looking to replicate the IlliniCloud: Let it grow organically.
“If you’re going to do something like this, you’re going to be a disruptive force, everybody expects us to grow rapidly but you don’t want to grow too fast,” he says. “You want to take your time and do it right.”
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