Hurricane Sandy has Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe thinking about effective DR planning. As an IT consultant and former CIO, Lowe has been involved in many DR planning exercises and offers four points to consider:

1. Geography matters: Companies need to consider the geographical extent of the likely events they need to plan against. A fire will be confined to one building. A tornado can be devastating but only impacts a narrow area. A hurricane or major earthquake can have a regional impact. To be effective, the DR site should be outside the potential impact area of the events.
2. Focus on what’s important: DR plans sometimes fail because every system is treated equally. Not all systems are critical, says Lowe. The first step in a good DR plan is a business impact analysis of all IT services to determine which the company can live without in an emergency.
3. One size may not fit all: Systems should be organized according to their DR needs as defined in the business impact analysis. Some transactional systems may require real-time backup and fail-over, but this kind of service is expensive. Others, such as company e-mail, may only really require backup every half hour and a recovery time of an hour or more. Still others may not require recovery at the disaster site at all, although their data still needs to be backed up off site for eventual recovery when the main data center is back in operation.
4. Make sure everybody knows their roles: DR plans fail when people become flustered or confused or are simply not available. Unexpected things go wrong in the middle of a disaster – batteries in walkie/talkies fail, people forget important steps in the DR drill, telephone and data communications systems either fail or become overloaded. Also employees are people first, workers second. They have families who come first in a disaster. Or they simply may be away on vacation or a business trip when disaster strikes. Or the worst case is they or their family members may be victims. The DR plan needs to be flexible, and include backups.

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