Question: What do earthquakes, fires, pandemics, civil unrest,
and hard drive crashes have in common?
Answer: Continuity planning will help us survive them all.
Version 3.0 of UC Berkeley's well-received continuity planning tool will be launched for use on October 31. Originally titled Restarting Berkeley (v1.0) in 2006, this web-based tool was improved and renamed the Berkeley Continuity Planning Tool (v2.0) in 2007. The upcoming version 3.0 will again be given a new name: UC Ready.
The name change, and the enhancements, reflect its selection as the designated tool of the Office of the President's UC Ready Program, a disaster-preparedness effort that will span the entire UC system: 10 campuses, 5 medical centers, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), and the Office of the President (UCOP).
Continuity planning
Continuity planning prepares the institution to continue performing its mission under conditions of duress. For example, if some of our classrooms are quake-damaged, or if half of our faculty are home with the flu, how will we teach our courses?
Many large corporations have continuity plans in place — usually calling them business continuity (BC) plans. IT organizations have long practiced a specialized form of BC planning called disaster recovery (DR) planning. Many organizations will state that this readiness later paid off when disaster hit.
In 2001, UC Berkeley decided to begin continuity planning in all departments on campus, becoming one of a very small number of universities to do so. Chancellor Berdahl established the Office of Business Resumption (now called the Office of Continuity Planning) to facilitate.
With more than 300 departments on campus, the need for an easy-to-use tool soon became apparent. After finding that the commercial BC planning tools were a poor fit in higher education, the Office of Business Resumption (OBR) decided to build its own. A FEMA-funded collaboration of OBR with IST–Application Services produced Restarting Berkeley, a web-based tool, in September 2006.
The application is an on-screen questionnaire that leads the user through a structured interview and produces a Departmental Continuity Plan. The action items contained in the plan provide a path for increasing readiness.
Campus staff report the tool to be user-friendly and effective: currently more than 200 departments on the Berkeley campus are using it. The tool works equally well for all types of departments — instructional, research, public service, patient care, collections, administrative, and support departments.
The application is also unique: it remains the only continuity planning tool designed specifically for higher education. Universities across the country asked us to share the tool, and we decided to make the code available at no charge. To date, more than 20 universities outside the UC System have adopted Berkeley's tool.
The pioneering Restarting Berkeley tool was honored twice in 2007, receiving the NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) Innovation Award and UC's Larry L. Sautter Gold Award.
UC Ready development and deployment
Designing UC Ready for use by all UC campuses and medical centers, UCOP, and LBNL presented some interesting technical challenges. Integrating different authentication and authorization systems, campus directories, and operating procedures required that UC Ready be designed with far more customizability than is typically found in a departmental application.
UC Ready relies on the UC Trust federated identity management framework to allow access from different campuses that use unique authentication systems. The software was designed with a customizable directory application programming interface (API) to allow integration with campus LDAP-based directories or SQL database tables. The application supports customizable operating parameters and data for each campus that uses the application.
UC Ready will be offered using the software-as-a-service (SAAS) model. The shared application will be hosted by IST on behalf of the subscribing campuses. IST's Web Applications group is responsible for development of the UC Ready software. Using Adobe Coldfusion and Microsoft SQL Server, IST's database management, identity management, and platform hosting teams are collaborating to design and deploy a robust, shared hosting environment capable of supporting hundreds of users across the UC system.
With such a broad audience of potential end-users, the development team is making significant enhancements to the user interface to fully comply with accessibility guidelines established by Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA.)
For more information, contact Adam Cohen, IST–Web Applications, or Paul Dimond, Office of Continuity Planning,