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CostEffective IT: In Emergencies
Cost-Effective
IT: In Emergencies, by Richard Sonnier
Houston
Business Show "Advisor" Richard Sonnier, of the Information
Technology Services firm Nimble Services, Inc., provides weekly
information on our show about business technology issues. He can be
reached at 281-445-4800 x250 or rsonnier@nimbleservices.com.
This week I will discuss IT in emergencies. It turns out that this
topic is all too timely. This article was delayed a week due to
unscheduled interruptions, and this week we saw an emergency in action
with Hurricane Ivan.
IT and Emergencies
As I have noted in previous articles, IT is critical to most
businesses. A natural disaster like Hurricane Ivan reminds us that we
must plan for emergencies. For IT, you need to consider:
- Emergency communication networks
- Emergency power
- Offsite backups of your systems and data
- Replacement equipment if your systems are destroyed
Emergency Communications
After a disaster a key priority is communications. How are you going to
notify all the people? It might surprise you that the number one IT job
after a disaster at
many major corporations is getting email back online. This is because
email is so essential to the communication and coordination of the
disaster recovery effort for the entire company. Alternative voice
communications are essential and cellular is not
necessarily the answer. After 9/11, many of the cellular base stations
in New York City were knock out so people were queued up to use one of
the
few remaining pay phones. For your data network, the Internet has much
greater survivability than the cellular network. During 9/11, much of
the communications in and out of New York City went over the Internet.
A startup company, National Notification Network (3n) , is focusing on
this problem with a very unique service. 3n has built a web application
where "one call reaches all". Located in multiple data centers in
different part of the US, the 3n system allows a person to contact many
people up to 12,000 in 10 minutes. You can enter your message via a web
interface or via a toll free phone call. The 3n system will try all
known communication methods to reach the people: email, pager, phone,
cell, instant messenger, etc. It requires the person to acknowledge the
receipt of your message and provides real time status reporting of who
has responded. It is the best solution to emergency communications that
is available today and offers many other features and benefits.
See www.3nonline.com for
details.
Emergency Power
After communications, power is a major priority. Most disasters like
Ivan will shutdown the
power grid to your IT facility so many companies add electric
generators to keep the facility up. Other companies build a duplicate
backup facility at another location unlikely to be impacted by the
same disaster. This alternative facility can store your data and system
backups as well.
Offsite Backups
I have discussed the absolute necessity of backups in previous
articles. In a disaster where your primary facility is destroyed, you
need to have those backups offsite in a safe location. There are many
service companies that offer offsite storage, e.g., Iron Mountain.
See www.ironmountain.com
for details. Otherwise you should send your backup tapes to one of your
remote offices or even take them home with you. I recommend storing at
least one full backup offsite each week.
Replacement Equipment
This is the tough one. It likely your IT systems and business processes
are finely tuned to work with your IT equipment so the safest choice is
to have a duplicate set of that equipment available. However, buying
all your IT equipment twice is very expensive. Some companies
specialize in providing replacement equipment on demand. One such
company is Sungard. They are used heavily by the financial industry and
were a big reason that the financial companies in New York City were
able to continue operations after 9/11. See www.sungard.com for details.
Unfortunately, such a service is not cheap. Alternatively, consider
saving your old equipment next time you upgrade and moving it to
offsite storage with your backups.
Next week, I will discuss stopping SPAM.
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