Force Majeure in IT contracts
As swine flu continues to get its ducks in line (pardon the mashed metaphor) you may find yourself consulting the force majeure clause in your mission-critical contracts. [Read more →]
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July 26, 2009 2 Comments
Preparing IT systems for Pandemic
As the progress of the pandemic continues to be uncertain and unpredictable, the only thing most organisations can do is to rpepare for the worst and be able to cope with anything shorty of that. For a fai;y detailed look at what you need to be doing this article from Netforce is worth a check.
The role of IT in pandemic planning is largely delivering remote access to your systems & maintaining communications with staff and customers. Throughout this issue of the Netforce Guide we focus on the different technologies which deliver your staff access to your network when they are at home, on the move, or working from a remote location, whilst maintaining the security and integrity of the network.
Test, test & test again
Many companies will rely on employees working from home in the event of a flu outbreak. However, their remote access systems may not be ready for so many employees using them at the same time. Experts recommend a trial run, where you allow a significant number of your staff to work from home for a day and then see how well your systems and applications function. You may need to buy more ports, licenses or cards for your remote access systems.High Availability
Make sure you have multiple access mechanisms and methods of access to connect to head office data. This could be as simple as being able to offer teleworkers SSL as well as IPSec VPN clients. Make sure key employees have broadband access from home as well as mobile broadband access. Mobile 3G data access is a good solution in a worst case scenario, since people may not be working from home. They may be leaving the area for health or safety reasons, and they may need to take their laptops with them. 3G network access as well as traditional DSL or cable access is another high availability, load balancing tactic.
How are you shaping up? Share the story in the comments.
July 10, 2009 No Comments
Curtin University pushes Virtual Private Network tools for pandemic response
The Ministry of Health has moved its pandemic response status to Phase 6 - 6.2 Code Yellow which can include declaring a public health emergency at a local or national level and restrictions on our borders, isolating affected areas of the country, restricting public gatherings and closing educational facilities. Clinical director of the Auckland Regional Public Health Service, Dr Julia Peters, said these new cases could require school closures and "We're probably close to those sorts of measures," she said.
The upshot of that is that organisational pandemic response plans will almost certainly need to be implemented. At Australia's Curtin University they are pushing VPN as a technology solution [Read more →]
June 15, 2009 No Comments
Some unrealistic expectations of ICT in pandemic response
I had a call from Matt Abud at ABC asking to discuss an article from Japan on using cellphones in a pandemic. Its interesting to see the kind of thing people are proposing these days. Here's some of the original article from behind a firewall.
The details have yet to be fixed, but SoftBank hopes to pick a school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.
The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to be examined by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.
"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, an infrastructure strategist at Softbank.
He demonstrates with a calculation: if an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,000 people would get sick.
The experiment was conceived before the outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside North America.
It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a programme to promote new uses for Japan's internet and cellular infrastructure. The country has some of the most advanced mobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speed mobile networks, and phones come standard with features such as GPS, television and touchless train passes.
The scheme raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.
If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said.
Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease.
"If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, said.
SoftBank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in autumn. But Mr Takahashi said that whichever company was chosen, he hoped the potential benefits of a monitoring system would be enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.
There are a couple of tracks on this, the first is some preliminary discussion that we mostly didn't cover in the full interview. The second is the recorded interview, although it merges about 8:30 into a bit of extra discussion that was not meant for broadcast so I have trimmed out Matt's side of the conversation and just rambled on.
The pandemic appears not to be especially deadly at this stage (although the 1918 pandemic also started with a mild infection wave that was followed by the real thing) but it does put people out of commission for various lengths of time and disrupts systems that depend on working at optimal, if not maximal levels. This piece from the NZ Herald is telling:
Rangitoto College principal David Hodge said he learned how disruptive quarantine was when 22 students and three staff and their families were placed in isolation after going on the school's Spanish language trip to Mexico.
Closing Rangitoto - a college of 3100 students in Mairangi Bay, North Shore City - could put the whole community in turmoil.
He said the school was confident in its communication channels, and would be able to send work to students through the internet.
But it had not had been told if a school closure would apply to staff as well as students.
Schools may be able to work remotely with their students in theory, but having a system in place for 100 students, and trying to run an entire school by remote learning is an order of magnitude different. If teachers cannot get to the school with its IT and teaching resources, there can be no teaching at all, and managing entire classes remotely is vastly more demanding than teaching them in a classroom.
Then there are the issues of
- what to do about those students from the 100,000 NZ families that do not have internet access at home
- whether dialup internet for most of the rest is adequate to transferring the files necessary
- whether families can afford to have their phone line tied up for extended perioopds of the day
- many more considerations I'm sure you can add.
These issues apply equally, and perhaps more urgently, to NFP organisations and especially those in ther welfare sector.
Gladstone Primary principal Dave Shadbolt sent the pandemic plan of his Mt Albert school to parents yesterday.
Most of the advice was about general hygiene, he said, and staff were reminding students about hand-washing routines and covering mouths and noses when they sneezed.
This is good information, but do you have a plan for how, and when, to decide to close down your operation and send everyone home? By the time the government mandates it, it will almost certainly be too late, but what are the criteria you would use and how do you plan to manage things when the office is shut?
The manager of occupational health and safety for the Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern, Paul Jarvie, said the effect of widespread quarantine caused by swine flu would compound on the impact of the recession, especially for workplaces already operating with skeleton crews.
The greatest cost to companies would mostly be loss of productivity, because if an employee had used up annual sick and holiday leave entitlements, an employer did not legally have to pay them.
However, the greatest cost to society will be that many of those people are already living on the edge of financial viability, if they have to go without income for a couple of weeks, or longer, what happens to their food and medication supplies, their mortgage or rent payments, their other debts?
What is your policy for those who are without income in a pandemic and can't pay you?
Comments open now, lets get a little wisdom flowing here.
June 11, 2009 No Comments
Pandemic Preparedness: Teleworking Best Practices
After a few weeks when the subject had dropped out of our general news, we may be in for an upsurge both in reporting and thinking about a possible Pandemic. Global health experts are continuing to warn that the world is on the brink of a swine flu pandemic, with Japan now experiencing uncontrolled spreading.
Companies worldwide are being forced to act quickly in evaluating their level of preparedness for a possible pandemic—and organizations like Telework Exchange, WorldatWork and the Telework Coalition are facing an inevitable deluge of queries about telework policies. via Pandemic Preparedness: Teleworking Best Practices. [Read more →]
May 21, 2009 No Comments
