* Will your business continuity plans hold up in the event of a disaster?
Early last week a pair of finance industry organizations kicked off a pandemic flu exercise that runs though Oct. 12. The purpose of the exercise is threefold: to help financial firms understand the potential risks a pandemic poses to the sector; to provide an opportunity for firms to test their pandemic plans; and to examine how the effect of a pandemic flu on other critical infrastructures will impact the financial services sector
The Financial Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) and Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FSSCC) are conducting the exercise, which calls for participating firms to respond to a series of scenarios updated throughout the three-week project.
I plan to keep tabs on the exercise, which more than 2,700 firms registered to take part in. I’ll share information about the results in a future newsletter, once FBIIC and FSSCC make their findings public.
In the meantime, F5 Networks (which clued me in to the pandemic flu exercise) used the launch of the FBIIC/FSSCC project to highlight how its own security and traffic-management tools can be used in tandem to help enterprises bolster their business continuity and disaster recovery readiness. The idea is to give remote users secure access to corporate resources — which is critical if traditional office sites aren’t accessible in the event of a crisis such as a flu pandemic and scores of employees wind up telecommuting.
F5’s integrated business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities combine the functionality of its FirePass SSL VPN appliance, which provides secure remote and WLAN client access, with the company’s Big-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) for load balancing.
“This integration helps organizations maintain user access for remote workers by virtualizing globally distributed FirePass clusters, as well as monitoring and managing user access to each FirePass VPN device,” F5 states.
Linked together, Big-IP GTM can periodically poll each clustered FirePass device and direct concurrent user logon requests to a FirePass device with available licenses without requiring an IT administrator to do anything manually. By combining traffic management with an SSL VPN, a company can balance application access to prevent outages and handle the increased load that occurs when there’s an unexpected surge of employees working remotely, according to F5.
Remote access and load balancing are just two of many technologies enterprises will depend on in the event of a crisis that disrupts normal business operations. What tools do you think are most critical? Please send me any comments you’d like to share.
