This year, the Canadian Higher Education Information Technology (CANHEIT) conference took place in Kingston, Ontario.
The conference focuses on IT issues of interest to Canadian universities and colleges. IT staff from across Canada gather each year to share ideas, best practices and to learn from one another.
Carleton’s Ben Schmidt presented on the DRP implications of using cloud-based services:
Honey, I broke the Cloud.
DRP (Disaster Recovery Planning) in a post-Cloud world.
Would having every family photo you own, on the Cloud, with no local backup, worry you?
Yet as staff and faculty members we increasingly rely on cloud-based services to access our email, and safeguard our documents (Gmail, Google Docs, Office 365, DropBox, …). And as IT departments, we increasingly incorporate cloud storage and SaaS back-ends to deliver our websites, LMSs, CRMs & ERPs and to safeguard our data (Amazon S3, Azure Cloud, Oracle Cloud …).
On Feb 28, 2017 Amazon’s AWS S3 cloud storage failed, disrupting websites across the East Coast. Last June and November 2016, separate ransomware attacks disrupted access to cloud email for staff and faculty at uCalgary & Carleton.
This presentation discusses the implications to architecting and managing services & institutional data in a cloud-first environment: how we choose where to accept the risks and “ride-out” outages and how we can architect to mitigate.
Presentation Slides
Learn more about the CANHEIT conference.