Safety & Security
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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.
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