College Planning & Management

MAR 2013

College Planning & Management is the information resource for professionals serving the college and university market. Covering facilities, security, technology and business.

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Safety & Security SHAIITH / DREAMSTIME.COM PREPARE AND BE AWARE Disaster Favor Two west coast colleges are providing back up space for each other's critical computer services and data in case of disaster. BY MICHAEL FICKE S S OME BUSINESSES CAN afford to use the cloud as an IT disaster backup solution. Colleges and universities, however, must think about education first. Backing up IT in case of disaster comes second. Many smaller liberal arts institutions don't even have secondary server rooms as backups. If an earthquake or flood destroys the single primary server room on campus, an institution won't be able to issue paychecks or deposit tuition payments. New students won't be able to register. All of the data stored in the learning management system will be inaccessible 53 to students as well as professors. School may well be over for the year. Because the results can be so dire, more and more schools are building secondary server rooms for disaster backup. The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and Pomona College in Claremont, CA, both have primary and secondary server rooms. But their technology chiefs don't believe that's enough. William E. Morse, Jr., J.D., chief technology officer and associate vice president for technology services at Puget Sound, and Kenneth Pflueger, chief information officer at Pomona, both worry that an COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / MARCH 2013 earthquake might destroy their primary and secondary computer rooms. Morse and Pflueger have created an innovative alliance to avoid disaster. Both have agreed to provide space for the other school's third set of backup servers. Soon, if an earthquake or other disaster knocks out Pomona's primary and secondary server rooms, Pflueger's IT team will connect to the servers backing up services and data in the University of Puget Sound's primary server room. Likewise, Morse's IT team will soon be able to connect to servers backing up its services and data in Pomona's primary server room. WWW.PLANNING 4EDUCATION.COM

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