Disaster recovery: Are you ready?
Now that the initial shock of Sept. 11 has passed, it's time - well past time - to revisit your own disaster-recovery planning in light of what happened at the World Trade Center. Especially important, in retrospect, is redefining the scope of a possible disaster.
In a very good article published in Novell's AppNotes in September 1999 ("A Disaster Recovery Strategy for Mixed NetWare 4/5 Environments"), author Phillip Moulay wrote, "Many of the disaster-recovery solutions available on the market work on the assumption that you will be restoring data onto the same hardware from which it was lost. However, in full disaster scenarios, it is rarely the case that the network administrator ends up with the same equipment."
Dust off your disaster-recovery plan - does it provide for the loss of all your equipment? All of your building? It is not pleasant to contemplate, but what would your company do in the event that you and your entire department were wiped out? Someone might know where your off-site back-up tapes were located, but who, and do they have access? If there are tapes, who has information about which archive software was used to create them? Who knows which platforms they were running on and which platforms they need to be restored to?
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A well-documented disaster-recovery plan includes all this information, it's true. But will anyone be able to find your plan? Is a copy stored securely off-site with the archived tapes as well as in another location? Who knows that, who knows where it is, and who has access to it?
If all your infrastructure is destroyed, where will you go to replace it? Is there a back-up facility waiting? Do you have vendors, and back-up vendors, ready to ship to you at a moment's notice? Does anyone know the details except you?
On the other hand, what happens if the IS department is all that's left after a major disaster? Executive management, sales, marketing and even finance are gone, but the network servers are still going. Does your company have a plan?
I don't have all the answers. Each situation will be different. What works for your competitor might not work for you.
No one is safe from disaster, though, so you had better be sure your plans are up to date. There's rarely a second chance in disaster recovery.
Tip of the week
Although geared toward natural disasters, the U.S. Department of Energy's Operation Fresh Start contains lots of references to information about recovering from full disasters.
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