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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DISASTER FAVOR Core Services Under the agreement, each school will decide on the core services it wants to back up, a task that is still in the works. "We're going to put our ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on our Puget Sound rack," Pflueger says. "That includes our student information system, financials, financial aid, and other systems. We'll also have our learning management system. With these systems we'll be able to pay our bills and conduct classes." What about email? Pflueger says he hasn't decided whether or not to back up email in Puget Sound. He has outsourced student email to a cloud service and is considering doing the same with faculty and staff email. Pflueger's plan is to backup data every night in Puget Sound, which means switching over would entail the loss of one day of data. "We could backup during the day, but I think it is too bandwidth-intensive, meaning expensive." In Case of Emergency The agreement names one official from each school who will declare an emergency. At that time, the appropriate host school will make the emergency system available to the guest school. Both Pflueger and Morse are working out the procedures neces- sary to bringing the remote sites online. When complete, the procedures will be written up and included in the disaster recovery files. When that happens, the procedures will be incorporated automatically into each school's disaster response and recovery drills. With any luck, that's all the live use these two disaster recovery centers will receive. CPM PL AN NING FOR THE U N THINK A BL E Disaster Planning STEVE CHARVAT Over the past decade, scores of colleges and universities both small and large have established emergency planning programs, offices, and functions. By harnessing the recent explosion of technical knowledge and the best practices of peer institutions, colleges and universities are quickly becoming more prepared to deal with the varied disasters and emergencies that can have a potential impact on their core missions of teaching, research, and public service. With both critical assets as well as liabilities, college campuses pose a unique planning challenge when it comes to disaster plans. While currently there are a number of guidance documents, workshops, and resources on the development of emergency/disaster management for government bodies and private sector companies, very little specific guidance or academic literature has been developed specifically targeted to the unique operational constructs of higher education. When developing a college/university disaster plan, higher education officials must recognize and directly apply the following five key guidelines to ensure success: • Establish an effective planning process • Establish cross-institutional teams to build support • Use all-hazards planning to anticipate changing needs • Include a crisis communications component • Maintain a phased and progressive planning cycle By instituting, implementing, and repeating the previous five guidelines, any college or university can improve on its emergency management planning system. Both newcomers to emergency planning as well as established programs can benefit from applying these concepts in preparing their campuses for the unthinkable. CPM Source: Excerpted from "College and University Disaster Planning: New Guidelines Based on Common Industry Principles and Practice" by Steve Charvat, director of Emergency Management, University of Washington. The full white paper is available for download at tinyurl.com/aljafvh. 58 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / MARCH 2013 WWW.PLANNING 4EDUCATION.COM

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