EDUCAUSE Live! September 6, 2006 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT); runs one hour

Going Beyond Recovery to Continuity: Lessons Learned

Special Guest

David G. Swartz
Vice President and CIO
The George Washington University

David Swartz is vice president and chief information officer at The George Washington University. Since joining GW in 1999, he has been responsible for GW's Information Systems and Services. During the past seven years, he helped consolidate a disparate IT infrastructure into an integrated organization with 260 employees and a $40 million budget. Thanks to a strategic plan developed in partnership with the university’s board of trustees, GW now has one of the most advanced campus networks in the world, composed of more than 16,000 fiber drops, which provides staff and faculty with up to one gigabit per second speed to the desktop. During Swartz's tenure, GW has replaced the university's mainframe applications with powerful servers supporting Web-based applications that simplify access and ease of use.

Swartz has 21 years of IT management experience within the university environment, including stints at West Virginia University, Oklahoma University, and the University of Maryland, and two years in the private sector. His efforts to enhance information security at GW were recognized by the National Technology Forum, which awarded GW its 2002 Best Practice Award for Cybersecurity, the first university to receive this award. He also has been an invited speaker on cybersecurity and has given talks at the recent International Cisco Summit and at the national and regional EDUCAUSE conferences. He holds a BS, an MS, and a PhD from the University of Maryland College Park, with a focus in economics. He has published more than 50 columns for Telemedicine Today, 33 peer-reviewed articles, two chapters, and one book.

Summary

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by David Swartz, and the topic will be "Going Beyond Recovery to Continuity: Lessons Learned."

The main campus of The George Washington University is located just a few blocks from the White House. The series of events surrounding 9/11 helped to accelerate advancement of a university-wide business continuity (BC) program years ahead of many other universities. Starting six years ago, the central IT program started the planning process for its disaster recovery program with a comprehensive risk assessment, something only about 11 percent of universities have completed to date. Over time the program has evolved from a focus on IT recovery from failure and disaster to a proactive program focused on fault-tolerant continuous modes of operations. In the last two years the focus has shifted and matured to university-wide emergency management and preparedness. Much has been learned over the past six years that will be shared during this presentation, including approaches to help facilitate reliable and continuous modes of operations, the importance of communications, and how to sell and pay for BC. GW will also share their departmental guides and templates for BC planning and assessment and answer questions about BC.

Related EDUCAUSE Resources

• Business Continuity Planning
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Security Risk Assessment and Analysis
• Archives of past EDUCAUSE Live! seminars