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Tag: disaster recovery plan

Maui wildfire alert system failure highlights critical gaps in disaster planning

COMPREHENSIVE WARNINGS, ALL SILENCED The State of Hawaii calls its All-hazard Statewide Outdoor Warning Siren System the “largest single integrated public safety outdoor siren warning system in the world.” It has over 400 solar-powered sirens – 80 of them on the Maui archipelago – capable of alerting residents to a wide range of natural and human-caused events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, terrorist threats, and wildfires. The sirens are a critical part of the more broadly scaled Statewide Alert and Warning System (SAWS), which uses the Federal Emergency...

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FAA NOTAM outage should scare all of us into (finally) testing our DRPs

ONE BAD FILE The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed the event was triggered by an employee error that caused a corrupt file in the NOTAM system’s database. Worse, the backup system that would have been used to restore the database also contained the same corrupt file. This should make IT practitioners cringe – I know I sure did. That’s because the presence of a corrupt backup strongly suggests the FAA’s disaster recovery plan (DRP) had likely not been tested in the leadup to this failure. Because the only way IT leaders would have known they had a problematic backup would...

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