Brent Rickels, senior vice president at First National Bank of Bosque County, had grown tired of dealing with antivirus software. He was tired of regularly updating virus signatures, tired of hackers constantly tweaking malware, and tired of worrying about what users had downloaded onto their PCs. So Rickels dumped the bank’s AV software for a whitelisting product and in the process, become one of its first commercial customers.

First National Bank of Bosque County, which serves the Waco, Texas, area and manages approximately $100 million in assets, had seen the volume of spam and spyware it had to beat back increase tenfold in four years. So when it was time for the bank to renew its Symantec AV license at the end of 2006, the timing was right to make a change.

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When it comes to disaster recovery, data is only one aspect of the entire business continuity framework.

But in their implementation of disaster recovery solutions, many organisations today are in a situation analagous to that of the emperor in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

They have purchased extremely expensive systems, dedicated almost wholly to the securing of data, without paying attention to the development of the operational and procedural processes that are required to effectively implement them. Again, when it comes to disaster recovery, data is only one aspect of the entire business continuity framework.

First, once the demands of the business have been identified, the technical requirements for the design of a disaster recovery environment should be formulated. Whilst the former may well be unfeasible and wholly unrealistic, the negotiation between what is desired and what is technically achievable is best arrived at through commercial attrition. In this manner the business is both enlightened and forced to establish the operational criteria for business continuance after a catastrophic event.

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