* Advice for disaster recovery planning from New York's former major
Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, last month addressed security specialists from around the world at the ASIS International conference. His message about preparing for the unexpected is worth sharing with all network executives.
The take-away from Guiliani’s speech can be summarized as such: when planning for disaster recovery, plan well and plan hard. Get the best minds at your disposal together and plan for every conceivable disaster. You may not cover every possible scenario of what can happen, but if you plan thoroughly you will find that any unexpected disaster that comes your way will most likely be just a variation of one that you have planned for.
The analogy he gave naturally referred back to the attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers. He said that long before that fateful day, he and his emergency response teams had formulated plans to address the most horrendous catastrophes (almost) anyone could imagine befalling a metropolis the size of New York City.
With a skyline as tall as Manhattan’s, they knew they had to plan for high-rise fires, and did. New York City has many old buildings, so they had plans in place to deal with building collapses. A major airport is right on the outskirts of the city, and because of that, they had planned for what to do if an airliner crashed in the city. Of course, no one on his staff could have foreseen the dramatic way that all these disasters would be unleashed on their city at the same time.
Giuliani says that because of the planning he and his staff had done, they were able to set up a mobile command post within minutes of the disaster instead of hours. That planning and mobility allowed the emergency response teams to set up near enough to Ground Zero to oversee the rescue efforts, and at a site of their choosing rather than buildings that were blocks or even miles away.
Of course, any thorough disaster recovery team is going to include people beyond the scope of just IT. You’ll have facilities, human resources, security, and even agencies from outside your company. Giuliani recommends you build a consistent team whose members clearly understand their responsibilities and tasks. Communication among the team members is critical to the success of any disaster recovery operation.
The point is to take some time with the people you’ve trusted to help run your company, and devise disaster recovery plans for every situation you can come up with. Take your time to carefully formulate the steps that need to be taken every day to ensure that your company will survive every conceivable disaster thrown at it. Then assign the tasks to responsible individuals and hold them accountable for seeing that they are done. If you take these steps then you can rest assured that if the unexpected does occur, you will be able to apply one of your plans, or a variation of it, to successfully deal with the situation at hand.
While Giuliani didn’t mention this, I will give you a bonus tip: devising a thorough disaster recovery plan for your business processes gives you a leg up on understanding how you can more closely tie IT to your company’s business needs. For example, to successfully recover from a disaster striking your business, you need to know what business processes are most critical to your daily operations. That leads you to documenting the critical IT systems that support those processes. Now you can see which IT systems should receive the highest levels of service, even without a disaster staring you in the face.
Michael Day is the Chief Technology Officer for Currid & Company. You can write to him at mailto:michael.day@currid.com
