Disaster Recovery Journal- Volume 18, Issue 2 - Spring 2005 Issue

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DISASTER RECOVERY
JOURNAL

P. O. Box 510110
St. Louis, MO 63151
(314) 894-0276
Fax: (314) 894-7474
Internet www.drj.com
E-mail drj@drj.com

EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jon Seals
jon@drj.com

SENIOR EDITOR
Janette Ballman
janette@drj.com

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Ed Pearce, CBCP
ed@drj.com

ASSISTANT EDITOR
Pamela Clifton
pamelaclifton@hotmail.com

COPY EDITORS
Jim Hammill, CBCP
Richard Sandhofer
richards@drj.com

ADVERTISING
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

_____________

Corporate

President/CEO
Richard L. Arnold, CBCP
richard@drj.com

Vice President
Robert Arnold
bob@drj.com

CONFERENCE COORDINATOR
Patti Fitzgerald, CBCP
patti@drj.com

CONFERENCE REGISTRAR
Merce Knese
mercedes@drj.com

CIRCULATION
Laura Baugh
laurab@drj.com

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
Mike Croy, Forsythe
Jeff Dato, MBCP, KPMG
John Jackson, IBM
Edward S. Devlin, E.S. Devlin & Associates
James Hammill, CBCP, JMH Consulting Inc.
Pat McAnally, SunGard Availability Services
Brian Turley, Strohl Systems
Belinda Wilson, Hewlett-Packard

INTERNATIONAL
CONTACTS
England: Thom Hetherington
Business Continuity
Phone: 0161-237-1007
thomh@tempus.demon.co.uk
Japan: Shinji Hosotsubo
Crisis Management and Preparedness Organization
Phone: 03-3519-6270
fax: 03-3519-6255
hosotsubo@cmpo.org
Brazil: José Carlos Ferreira
Disaster Recovery Mercosul
Phone and fax: 011-3666-9506
jocaff@uol.com.br

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Interview with Mike Luebke of Infocrossing Healthcare Services, Inc.

By DR. THOMAS D. PHELAN

Mike Luebke is the president of Infocrossing Healthcare Services, Inc. A subsidiary of Infocrossing, Inc., a premier IT outsourcing provider based out of Leonia, NJ, Infocrossing Healthcare Services, Inc. offers IT solutions to the healthcare industry, including claims processing, business and clinical application hosting, health plan application and IT infrastructure services for the payer, provider and government markets. Prior to joining Infocrossing Healthcare Services, Inc., Luebke was the president of Verizon Information Technologies, Inc., responsible for operations of Verizon’s IT commercial outsourcing business. Luebke enjoyed a 30-year career with GTE and Verizon, focusing on improving performance in information technology and telecommunications operations.

Phelan: Mike, as president of a company that provides IT infrastructure capabilities to the healthcare market, what is the most important objective to your customers in terms of business continuity?
Luebke: Access to potentially life saving information and applications. This cannot be overstated; healthcare companies have many challenges in terms of business continuity because their healthcare is a 24/7 process requiring full-time availability. Real-time enterprises (RTEs) such as healthcare providers, have greater risks with downtime so the business continuity plan needs to be seamless and completely integrated. In the event of a disaster, they need to be able to focus on their core competency of providing healthcare instead of worrying about the availability of their IT systems. They need the peace-of-mind and confidence of knowing they have dedicated processing solutions for “instant” failover. In many cases, this “hot standby” approach can be significantly less expensive than maintaining duplicate facilities. This infrastructure continuity is key to ensuring our customers are able to maintain their focus on core competencies and continue with their business, which is often life saving. BC is extremely important in all businesses but is raised to a new level as it relates to healthcare and the improved automation of clinical and business aspects

Phelan: How do you ensure that all potential disruptions have been addressed in the BCP?
Luebke: We are very disciplined in our approach to defining a customer’s business continuity requirements. We follow our outsourcing methodology which consists of three building blocks in understanding the customer’s strategic goals: enterprise discovery, strategic business assessment and solution development and analysis. Utilizing the approach of understanding and documenting the customer’s business and technology requirements allows us to align IT and business/clinical operations to the business continuity plan.

Phelan: Does Infocrossing have a standard offering for BCP and DR?
Luebke: Each customer requires a BCP and DR analysis and plan. Each customer has different needs, and we offer a wide range of solutions that can be customized to address those requirements. For example, one company may only need to ensure that their IT infrastructure is fully recoverable, while another will need to ensure that their employees have ready-to-use workstations and office infrastructure available. In addition, IT infrastructure requirements vary so much by company and industry, we must have the ability to provide everything from mainframe recovery services to managed services for open systems.

Phelan: What do you think of BCP and DR coming together?
Luebke: As we continue to experience worldwide events that raise the importance of BCP and DR, our customers have become much more pro-active and educated in their approach to this issue. Instead of just preparing for a major event, complete BCPs are developed to ensure the seamless continuation of business. Regardless of whether it is a natural disaster or a computer virus, detailed planning incorporates all scenarios and documents the recovery processes around them. In addition, regulatory requirements and industry standards now dictate business continuity measures. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has had a great impact on both the banking and healthcare industry. HIPAA helps to protect patients’ health information, which must be addressed in all business continuity plans. BCP and DR are going to be taken to new levels and challenges as clinical healthcare has a greater reliance on applications, communication and an expectation of 100 percent access, 100 percent of the time.

Phelan: Mike, any final thoughts regarding the future of BCP and its implications to CIOs and other executives?
Luebke: It is important for companies to remember that one solution doesn’t fit all in terms of BCP. A disciplined approach to assessing business processes, internal controls and tools will be of great benefit to companies defining the solution requirements. Plans must be thorough, tested and maintained with the goal of keeping employees safe while also maintaining business processes. Companies need to know that their plans will actually work in the event of an emergency – not just look good on paper. These past three years have taught us that our BCP and DR plans can no longer sit on a shelf and collect dust but must be real living documents that work and can provide the flexibility to keep a company going after a major event. We can no longer believe that the worse case scenario won’t happen

Dr. Thomas D Phelan is president, Strategic Teaching Associates, Inc., a disaster recovery planning and emergency management training consulting firm in Liverpool, New York.