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DISASTER
RECOVERY
_____________ Corporate President/CEO Vice
President
CONFERENCE REGISTRAR Brazil:
Jose Carlos Ferreira
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Click Here for a Printable Version SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS Contingency
Planning Considerations Should Have Been Obvious By DAN PERRY Business recovery
and contingency planning are frequently utilized terms where the requirements
are normally misunderstood and, without exception, never completely
implemented. At my company, contingency
planning responsibilities are currently unique by site, and further
separated by category or function – i.e. information technology
requirements are developed and exercised completely separate from facilities.
Personnel bereavement and emotional issues have not been considered
a part of the business contingency planning strategy. The events of Sept.
11, 2001 proved that most contemporary plan’s primary inclusions
are items such as corporate infrastructure, major IT data centers, hardware
and extensive facility planning. All obviously of crucial importance
in recovering a disaster riddled business. We now realize these make
up only a part of the overall recovery pie. We must expand upon the
obvious paradigm and think outside the proverbial box to establish total
business impact, and ultimate recovery, in such situations. It is necessary to
also include such parameters as the loss of a key individual’s
knowledge, the impact of unfamiliar work environments, employees’
obvious stressed state of mind, impaired ability to communicate or even
the simple difficulties in commuting to and from work. It’s difficult
to imagine, much less incorporate into a business recovery plan, the
amount of employee time and productivity lost, for instance, in hospital
visits to injured cohorts or the staggering number of death services
and funerals to be attended when thousands are impacted. Simple things like
having a place for a person to work, with a telephone and network attached
desktop PC become incredible challenges. During a time when
an erroneous decision could possibly result in placing the entire company
in jeopardy’s way, effective, level-headed decisions are expected
from people who have just recently lost family, friends, cohorts, managers
and acquaintances. Analyzing this in a calmer light would reveal management
expectations, such as this, are totally unrealistic. It’s easy, from
an individual’s prospective, to define what portions of contingency
planning are the responsibilities of IT and which portions belong to
facilities and so on. However, many of the real issues can fall in the
huge gray area lying between those, so called, obvious responsibilities. It would be nice if
each company had a contingency planning organization with corporate
authority and worldwide responsibility. That organization could then
take full responsibility for all activity necessary to guide the company
through a period like the World Trade Center businesses are currently
experiencing. Painful lessons have
been learned. It is now necessary for all of us (IT, facilities, emergency
health services, purchasing, space planners, security, etc) to polish
up our collective crystal balls and utilize the resources at our disposal
to identify all conceivable activities of potential impact. This doesn’t
mean we must commit to a multi-million dollar, automated recovery plan
for each remote possibility; but we must, at least, have a comprehensive
plan identifying the real business impacts and an approach for addressing
each of them. The plan must determine
where each business function is going to be performed, who is going
to do it and the availability of recovery equipment i.e. servers, phones,
PCs, printers, copiers, faxes, as well as obvious factory equipment. The plan must also
provide an approach, when necessary, to quickly access trained, non-emotional
personnel (managers and staff), who have, as a course of business, received
continuous advanced cross-training, that will allow them to immediately
step in and hit the ground running. Today’s conventional
organizational structure does not specifically identify business contingency
planning as a corporate function. Consequently, the only way to accomplish
this level of business recovery planning is to enlist, with management
support, the involvement of multiple organizations. A task force should
be formed from these participating groups with the main goal being a
comprehensive business impact analysis to identify and quantify the
value of each business critical corporate function. If a function is necessary
to properly perform any of the above activities, it is business critical
and must be effectively performed through any type of adverse situation.
We have to get better: It will not be possible
to accomplish all this overnight, but it is extremely important to expeditiously
pursue this activity while the stark memories and repercussions of these
terrible attacks are vivid in our minds.
Dan Perry has managed different computer support systems support organizations for more than 20 years. He has been in management with AMD for more than 13 years and currently holds the position of senior IT staff member responsible for IT disaster readiness worldwide. To comment on this article, go to 1503-15 at www.drj.com/feedback.
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