Many government offices must do better at backing up their information systems to preserve important data and ensure “continuity of operations” in the event of a terrorist attack, several federal technology officials said on Tuesday. “We have not done all that much in this area, except for our national-level systems,” Robert Coxe, deputy chief information officer at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said during a homeland security conference sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. “I think we have a lot of catching up to do.” Despite having effective backup capabilities for its largest systems, FEMA’s continuity-of-operations plan for many other systems is “very poor” and typically amounts to “a pile of tapes” containing archived data, according to Coxe. Full Story