View from the Hill

A new guide entitled ‘Information technology — Security techniques — Guidelines for information and communications technology disaster recovery services’ has been published by the International Organization for Standardization.

ISO/IEC 24762:2008 provides guidelines on the provision of information and communications technology disaster recovery (ICT DR) services as part of business continuity management, applicable to both “in-house” and “outsourced” ICT DR service providers of physical facilities and services.

ISO/IEC 24762:2008 specifies:

• Requirements for implementing, operating, monitoring and maintaining ICT DR services and facilities;
• Capabilities that outsourced ICT DR service providers should possess and the practices they should follow, to provide basic secure operating environments and facilitate organizations’ recovery efforts;
• Guidance for selection of a recovery site;
• Guidance for ICT DR service providers to continuously improve their ICT DR services.

Richard Murray, our Technical Director, is the co-author of the ‘IT Governance’ paper being presented by Donnie Mapanao, Head of IT in Addax Petroleum’s Geneva headquarters.

As part of our commitment to environmental management, we monitor our energy use within the office.  Here are the latest graphs which show that we’ve been successful in reducing our gas use by over 20%.  However, we are getting slightly worse in terms of our electricity consumption.  To try to improve, we’ve put a number of ‘Switch It OFF!’ stickers from the Carbon Trust on items of equipment that we’ve noticed sometimes get left on overnight.  We’ve also invested in a remote controller that allows a number of electrical items to be disconnected from the mains supply in one go.  This simplifies end-of-day activities.

Hillside Software operates an associate book store at amazon.co.uk.  The shop includes many quality management, software engineering, information security and environmental management titles.