System iNetwork

July 31, 2007

Don't Let Those Vacationing Hurricanes Fool You

With all the dire warnings about global warming, and the sad stories of shattered lives that continue to come out of the U.S. Gulf Coast, maybe it's slipped your mind that this summer, as Eliza Doolittle once practiced in My Fair Lady, "hurricanes hardly happen." I'm sure no one in Florida is missing them, but with hurricanes seemingly on vacation so far this summer, without them something else seems to be missing: Object lessons about the value of business continuity services.

There are too many enterprises that continue to insist on learning the hard way that you need a backup, and a plan for what to do when that backup fails. AT&T's Business Continuity Study this year, a telephone survey of 1,000 IT executives in 10 U.S. cities, showed that 30 percent of U.S. businesses still don't consider business continuity planning a priority! Not only that, only 41 percent of companies that have already experienced a disaster take any action in response to warning from governments at any level (it's only 33 percent among those that haven't experienced one).

I personally know of a company in the Denver area (not mine, thank goodness), which I won't name for obvious reasons, that doesn't even back up its systems at night. If their server should crash, they'd have to reconstruct all their business records from scratch and be reduced to asking all their business partners who owes who what just to reconstruct their general ledger. We all know this company isn't a fluke; you probably know someone yourself that works at at least a small company where the same is true, don't you? Or maybe even something worse?

This example of neglect is a particularly stark one, certainly, but even if your company does backups, if you don't have a business continuity plan, you may be personally participating in a pattern of negligence that's nearly as bad. Or at least, could be judged so in court if one of the many catastrophes that happen around the world every day happens to take place where you work.

Not that having a business continuity plan is a panacea. The AT&T survey reports that of those companies that do have a plan, only 57 percent have updated the plan, and only 41 percent have tested them, in the past 12 months. And while I'm using the idea of natural disasters as an example, we all know that catastrophic data corruption can come from many other sources: hackers, viruses and worms, and other human activity -- intentional and unintentional, internal and international.

Some of the reasons for the business continuity blind spot are obvious. Sublime confidence that "it won't happen here" and too many hotter fires burning in the IT department than to undertake a continuity project are just two excuses that too many IT people use to mentally write off the danger. The trouble is, if something does happen, not only is the tree going to fall pretty close to your personal head, but think about all the other work you've proudly done that might be compromised, ruined, or at least overshadowed. It's the 21st century, and some people still think their computers are indestructible?! At least we can say the wellsprings of human optimism run deep.

If your company doesn't have a plan, at least take the first step. Do some research. Someone's got to be the hero, why not you? There are plenty of information sources, and companies that offer continuity planning services that can offer plans and no-obligation information about where to start. AT&T, of course, has such services, that's why it did the study, but they're not System i-specific. The Business Continuity Institute's web site offers some vendor-neutral information.

Other places to go for help include IBM Global Services and the major System i high-availability vendors, Vision Solutions and DataMirror. There are also a number of companies that specialize in business continuity consulting, such as Advanced Continuity, CAPS Business Recovery Services, Clear Technologies, CompuTek Consulting , Cosgrove Consulting Group, El Camino Disaster Recovery, MSI Systems Integrators , ProActive Solutions, Strategic Computer Solutions, Synergistic Solutions, and Tamp Computer Services.

There are others. If your company offers System i business continuity services, please post a response and add yourselves to this list.

Posted by at July 31, 2007 3:11 PM