nanog mailing list archives
Re: Megaupload.com seized
From: JC Dill <jcdill.lists () gmail com>
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:39:22 -0800
On 21/01/12 12:19 PM, George Bonser wrote:
Imagine a situation where several municipal governments in, say, Santa Cruz County, California are using such services and there is a repeat of the Loma Prieta quake. Their data survives in Santa Clara county, their city offices survive but there is considerable damage to infrastructure and structures in their jurisdiction. But the communications is cut off between them and their data and time to repair is unknown. The city is now without email service. Employees in one department can't communicate with other departments. Access to their files is gone. They can't get the maps that show where those gas lines are. The local file server that had all that information was retired after the documents were transferred to "the cloud" and the same happened to the local mail server. At this point they are "flying blind" or relying on people's memories or maybe a scattering of documents people had printed out or saved local copies of. It's going to be a mess.
This is what disaster simulations are for, to suss out these problems before a disaster and put in systems to avoid the mess.
In the real world, while a city might keep the digital documents "in the cloud" they would also (always) have paper copies, because in a big emergency their computers (local mail/file servers or internet access to the cloud) are likely to be unavailable, power or internet access is likely to be disrupted. In a true emergency such as Loma Prieta, they are going to reach for the paper maps that were printed and saved for just this eventuality, and part of the emergency preparedness is to have a regular process to print and save updated maps (every year or 6 months or month or whenever there's a major change - each department will undoubtedly have their own metrics depending on how critical their maps are). If you haven't participated in your city/county CERT training and disaster simulation exercises, I highly suggest you get involved. CERT is a great program and will really help open your eyes to many types of emergency planning you probably haven't thought about. Plus, the more involved you are with CERT the more you are "known" to your local disaster management teams, and the better access you will have to them in the event of a major disaster.
jc
Current thread:
- Re: Megaupload.com seized, (continued)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Joly MacFie (Jan 20)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Jay Ashworth (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Rich Kulawiec (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Roland Perry (Jan 21)
- RE: Megaupload.com seized George Bonser (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Lyle Giese (Jan 21)
- RE: Megaupload.com seized George Bonser (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Michael Thomas (Jan 21)
- RE: Megaupload.com seized George Bonser (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Donald Eastlake (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized JC Dill (Jan 21)
- RE: Megaupload.com seized George Bonser (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized JC Dill (Jan 23)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Matthew Kaufman (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized James Smith (Jan 21)
- RE: Megaupload.com seized George Bonser (Jan 22)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Michael Thomas (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Joel jaeggli (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Michael Thomas (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Jay Ashworth (Jan 21)
- Re: Megaupload.com seized Steven Bellovin (Jan 21)