Disaster Recovery Journal

This will help guide the program to make the operations really resilient. Honest answers are critical.

Take a second to reflect on the tsunami crisis in Japan that exposed the four nuclear reactors. Nobody asked the question, “What if that don’t work?” Here’s what I mean.

Build a reactor along the coast in an earthquake zone, so we make sure we build in strong enough to survive any quake, say 8. 5 magnitude, the largest we’ve ever seen.

“What if that don’t work?”

Magnitude 9+ quake cracks the containment housings. OK, but we built fail-safe mechanisms in to automatically shut the reactors down by extracting fuel rods automatically in a water cooled region. Electric power from the grid feeds back into the reactor to keep the cool water circulating.

“What if that don’t work?”

You mean, like, a tsumani that wipes out the grid? That’s easy, we have a bank of emergency generators to provide electricity until the grid power is restored.

“What if that don’t work?”
That’s OK. We just keep adding fuel
to the generators.
“What if that don’t work?”
In fact, there are no refueling trucks.
The entire community was wiped
out. Even if the grid weren’t wiped
out, refueling trucks couldn’t keep
the generators running, because the
streets are gone.
“What if that don’t work?”
Oh yes, it really doesn’t matter. Did I
mention the generators were wiped
out as well by the 30-foot wall of
water? It isn’t just a matter of restoring
the grid power, the entire grid in the
community was wiped out by the
tsunami.
Meltdown ensues.

OK, let’s apply this same methodology to a small business, and analyze our previous risk assertions:

u We’re not in a flood zone, so we don’t need to worry about floods. “What if that don’t work?” Maybe you aren’t in a flood zone, but does your IT equipment, teller stations, or vital records care where water damage can come from? I don’t think so.

It could be a burst water main, blocked
storm sewer, section of roof missing.
Water damage mitigation can take many
forms: dry pipe extinguishers in your data
center to complement an FM200 system
might prevent one type of flood; manual
cashier procedures to ensure you can still
service your customers; off-site copies of
vital documents, or electronic document
backups to mitigate a file cabinet full of
paper mache following the flood.
u Hurricanes occur along the coast, not
here. “What if that don’t work?” Violent
storms occur everywhere, not just along
the coast. The difference with a hurricane is
that there’s usually less warning for inland
storms. Your mitigations should include
things like sheltering, emergency rations
of food & water, provisions for staffing,
procedures for working off-line in the event
of wide spread power outages.
u We have a generator, so we’ll always have
backup power. “What if that don’t work?”
It’s OK, we’ve got a fuel contract. “What if
that don’t work?” The generator is under
preventative maintenance. “What if that
don’t work?” Manual, off-line processing
can mitigate wide-spread lack of power.

The SunGard Continuity toolkit offers a collection of industry-leading whitepapers and a practical incident management checklist to help you develop solid plans for unplanned disasters of any size.

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