Defining Emergency Response for College IT

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Defining Emergency Response for College IT
Mike Osterman Whitman College
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WALLA WALLA Washington

• Hanford Nuclear Reservation
• Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot
• Local fault line
• Wildfires
• Floods
• Mt. St. Helens

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Institutional Planning

• Emergency planning exercises
• Systems/telecom an afterthought
• Assumed to just work
• Easy to set up
• Low budget priority for emergency infrastructure

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Ready for small-scale problems

• 2 server rooms
• Separate power grids
• Sufficiently distant
• Tape backups
• 3 off-site locations
• Redundant paths to Internet
• Most servers have remote backup

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Previous attempts

• Overly ambitious
• Commercially co-located server
• Hours of backup power
• Too costly to justify
• Poor follow-through

Tulane University
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Refocusing

• Key technology goals
• Provide information to the outside
• Ability to locate people
• Contact information for family members
• Personnel concerns
• Where is the information?
• Who is responsible?
• CLAC Survey

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City-wide mass casualty exercise
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First pass

• Emergency information web sites
• http//emergency.whitman.edu
• http//emergencyblog.whitman.edu/
• Basic hosting with commercial host
• DNS authority to ISP
• Web-based DNS admin
• Geographically distinct infrastructure
• No ERP solution in place
• Text file to USB drive

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Where wed like to be

• Co-located server at peer institution(s)
• Easier means for updating emergency page
• Better ERP solution
• Identify staff at peer institutions for IT help

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Survey on reciprocal hosting

• What does emergency hosting mean?
• What do you already have in place?
• Where would you like to be?

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Survey Results

• 12 respondents
• Desired solutions
• Emergency Information
• Mirrored ERP system
• Email accounts
• Conclusions
• No one size fits all solution
• Grouping will be challenging
• Define different levels of partnership
• Security liability issues

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Where do we go next?

• Consortially coordinated effort
• Peer to peer pairing
• ?

Discussion list clac_reciprocal_at_lists.whitman.edu