Defining Emergency Response for College IT

Mike OstermanWhitman College

slide 2CLAC 2006

• Hanford Nuclear Reservation

• Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot

• Local fault line• Wildfires• Floods• Mt. St. Helens

WALLA WALLAWashington

slide 3CLAC 2006

Institutional Planning

• Emergency planning exercises

• Systems/telecom an afterthought– Assumed to “just work”– Easy to set up

• Low budget priority for emergency infrastructure

slide 4CLAC 2006

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

slide 5CLAC 2006

Previous “attempts”

• Overly ambitious– Commercially co-located

server– Hours of backup power– Too costly to justify– Poor follow-through

Tulane University

slide 6CLAC 2006

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

slide 7CLAC 2006

City-wide mass casualty exercise

slide 8CLAC 2006

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

slide 9CLAC 2006

Where we’d 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

slide 10CLAC 2006

Survey on reciprocal hosting

• What does emergency hosting mean?

• What do you already have in place?

• Where would you like to be?

slide 11CLAC 2006

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

slide 12CLAC 2006

Where do we go next?

• Consortially coordinated effort

• Peer to peer pairing

• ?

Discussion list:clac_reciprocal@lists.whitman.edu