Compass Consulting International, Inc.
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Compass Consulting International, Inc.
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"Did the Lights Go Out? Part 2 of the series on Disaster Recovery Planning By Geoffrey C. Tritsch and Dr. Robert Kuhn In last month's installment, we talked about getting the disaster planning process started. This month we are going to talk about a conceptual framework for disaster planning. Talking loosely, we often speak of hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides and the like as natural disasters; and fires, explosions, vandalism, etc. as man-made disasters. But these events are not in and of themselves disastrous, no matter how large. Think of a monster hurricane in the middle of the ocean, or the thousands of acres of bush fires that renew remote Australian forests every summer. Unless there are actually negative effects from the event, there is no disaster. In fact we don't even measure disasters by the result or chain of results so much as by the final impact. Who or what was hurt? What was lost? How long will it take before full operation is restored? How much will it cost to fix? To make this abstract discussion more concrete, let's take a (somewhat improbable) example. Suppose a tornado tore through and destroyed a whole neighborhood which had already been evacuated for demolition in order to build a giant new ballpark. The results in terms of physical effect would normally qualify as a major disaster, but the lack of impact - few injured, none killed, little expense - means that there was no disaster. There are essentially three components to any disaster: an Event has Results which in turn have Impact on the user community. When deciding on a business continuity strategy in the face of possible disasters, one can target any or all of these components for prevention, mitigation, amelioration, or restoration.
Let's look at a simple example. "Backhoe fade" is the term given to the effect one experiences on the network when digging severs a cable. Good processes accompanied by accurate maps make it unlikely that anyone will unwittingly start digging over one of your conduits. Prevention is the best approach where it is possible.
However, through ignoring procedures, misreading maps, or risk-taking ("I won't be digging that deep") digging will still take place. Burying warning tape above the route of network conduits is a measure to prevent the backhoe getting to the conduit - preventing the results. Concrete-encasing the conduit is designed to mitigate the result if the backhoe does dig that far. If the conduit (and its contents) is severed, then diverse routing can mitigate the impact. If your network can adapt to the loss of the connection, then the impact is ameliorated. Otherwise, your choice is to fix it (recover) or abandon it. All disaster planning or business continuity strategies can be reduced to these three categories: prevention or avoidance strategies (stop it happening), mitigation or amelioration strategies (it may happen, but it won't matter so much), and recovery or restoration strategies (fix it afterwards). For each disaster (or category of disaster as you probably can't plan for every eventuality), ask yourself the following: (Pick one from each column):
Your answers need to be prioritized using a healthy dose of common sense: first, protect lives; second, limit physical property damage; and third, mitigate/limit interruption of business operations. The common wisdom is that prevention is much, much cheaper than recovery. On the other hand, major events tend to be very, very unlikely. Next month, in "What Are You Afraid Of? (Risk Analysis)," we'll look at the balancing of expensive measures against unlikely events.
Geoffrey Tritsch, President of Compass Consulting, has been a technology consultant specializing in higher education since 1980. He is a frequent presenter at workshops and conferences and a contributor professional journals. As Senior Consultant with Compass Consulting, Dr. Robert Kuhn focuses on assisting clients with management and planning for information technology. His core competencies extend deep into the fundamentals: systems and applications technologies and complex networking.
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