Wow! What an eventful weekend! By now, if you are like me, you are cleaning up the debris left behind from Ike’s path through the US. Ike’s effects are far reaching and not just isolated to the coastal areas of the US. This became readily apparent to me as he spun his path through the Midwest on Sunday. The effects were dramatic and direct; impacting my family and many of my friends, clients, and business associates. To say the least, Ike left us with a series of events, challenges, and opportunities for improvement in the technology space.
Bear with me a bit… It is Monday evening and in sleepy little Cincinnati, Ohio, we still have significant portions of the geography without power and services. Nearly 600,000 are still without power. A large number of schools and business are going to be closed for the second day and counting because they cannot serve their customers. If you have planned appropriately, or, you are lucky enough to be a tenant in a facility that has standby power generation, chances are that you have been able to conduct business today. If not, there is no clear timeline as to where and when services will be restored. Crews from various local governments, public service agencies, and utility companies have been working throughout the night and will continue to work throughout the week to restore services.
The impact on business has been significant enough that the Cincinnati USA Chamber has opened up its offices in downtown Cincinnati to assist its members with temporary office space and use of land-line telephone service. Considering that a significant number of its membership are comprised of small/medium businesses; this is a most gracious offering and grand undertaking, but a one-time opportunity, not one than can be expected in every event. This also reinforces the fact that every business, no matter how large or small needs to have some sort of a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan.
I’m not suggesting that every business needs a plan that delivers five nines. For most, the cost may outweigh the benefit. Where lives are at stake, say in a hospital or medical treatment facility, there is no question that clean, uninterrupted power and continuous operation is the only acceptable standard. However, what I am suggesting is that if you don’t have a basic contingency plan to continue to operate during a localized, regional, or national event, your business is at risk and your career as an IT professional may be short-lived. I’d like to offer up a few things to think about as you consider your own environment:
I will leave you with one last thought… BCDR Plans will only be funded within an organization if the key stakeholders understand it and “drink the Kool-Aid”. To reinforce this fact, here is one of my favorite cartoons, that unfortunately, is reality to many: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-08-15/
Kenneth Buck is an accomplished executive with a foundation of management and performance excellence with AT&T and several other global corporations. Currently, he is the president and CEO of Five Nines, LLC, a Global Management and Technology consulting firm.
As an economist and a technology executive, he has spent his career working with Fortune 500 companies across the professional service, manufacturing, financial, advanced technology, and telecommunications sectors. He has extensive experience managing profit and loss operations, developing and adopting new technology, leading product launches, managing IT infrastructure, global network operations, and driving sales and marketing organizations towards excellence.
Buck is recognized as an exceptional leader with the demonstrated ability to manage internal and external relationships, solve business problems, and implement strategy that nets revenue and profitability. He leads by example and develops organizational capacity supporting high performance work cultures and customer driven environments. Buck can be reached via telephone at 513-583-1516 or e-mail.
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The wide-spread effects from
The wide-spread effects from Hurricane Ike has reinforced the concept of applying the same concepts that IT has typically used for a data center disaster to individual office locations and personal computers.
If the data center is unavailable, the most critical applications are addressed first, typically those that "run the business". This same idea should be extended to accessing those applications, and done so in as generic a way as possible to enable any device, via the Internet, to resume the service. As Ike demonstrated, your staff might get relocated a state away and might use employees personal equipment. The more you allow those "might's" to occur, the better your chances of recovering service in a timely manner.
This approach can also bolster other scenarios, the most distressing being a virus that infects your company and renders all your PC's inoperable. The idea is to spend the right amount of dollars protecting your IT systems, and allow your Business Continuity planning to take care of the rest.
DR, RTO, RPO, BCDR and ilk
Good article. Except why always all these, everchanging and ..., acronyms, abbreviations and fancy wording? If the goal is sales / marketing then they are OK, kind of, but they sell! If an article is about hard facts, ideas, wider than just one product or whatever, etc - they are really getting things mixed up!
Not a long ago I did a systems assessment, a network, functionality, performance, security and yes, DR for a hospital system (state wide). So - dealing with people on law, technical installations (IT, buildings, electricity, etc), IT logistics, administration to doctors, pharmacists and other in health care - in same room sometimes made my head hurt! Same acronyms, same abbreviations and meaning totally different things to almost every person in room! To explain and to learn them by everyone would have taken ages - so, no DR strategy, plans and designs very fast - if ever! Well, actually yes, we did it and much more but much too much time was wasted arguing the terms instead of facts. All very intelligent and educated persons so they understood the talk and could comprehend written text very well - it's just that PCP, DR, BCD, whatever can mean a lot of things in relation of the corporate, institution, infrastructure (IT is not the only one which has infrastructure), and so on.
With my background from medical, chemistry, manufacturing, trading, banking to security in IT I would say - be very careful, misunderstandings and errors come very easy and they can kill even the best intentions (or projects).
Now - 24x7 needs strategy and planning. Sometimes I (we) have designed just extra power, extra computer rooms, etc - sometimes when it is "mission critical" totally new backup centers a long way from primary. And this is nothing new - I did my first in 70's, up for online in 2 hours if the disaster was only local under 20 miles radius, up in 1 day if it was national disaster. In 80's some government jobs - you actually would have needed 2 xx Mt nuclear bombs to take out those centers and the network.
Now - there is the hardware, etc costs but not as much as thought. The backup center can normally handle some load so that cost is nothing. In case of crises it is the basic services which are needed - not new and fancy, it comes later. So, the personnel cost is rather low and often included, the backup center is already running some of the load. And so on.. Lines are cheap (really!), 100+ miles fiber loops (just for redundancy) were already in 80's like 0.001% of the total cost?
Ouch - I forgot, we are talking about IT and their budget, security, recovery - not the business continuity? Or are we?
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