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Disaster Recovery: The Time Is Now
10/21/2005
On the heels of Katrina, it's time to get a top-flight disaster recovery plan into place. Here's how to catch up.
AS THE WATERS RECEDE, Tulane technologists bring systems back on line and look for new ways to protect, secure, and prepare them for crises.
Within 48 hours of Hurricane Katrina battering the Southeast, only two of the many four-year universities in New Orleans had Web sites up. The others showed “failure to connect” messages to students, parents, family members, friends, faculty, staff, or others trying to learn about the state of the schools in which they had a vested interest.
Two weeks later, the silent schools showed signs of life online, albeit with rough edges: links that went nowhere and highly visible content that was dated. On its home page, one Catholic university mourned the passing of the Pope and shared the schedule for April 2005 memorial masses. Another university, whose buildings sustained flood damage up to the second floor, advertised on its home page for data entry operators to aid in hurricane recovery efforts from its temporary headquarters in Baton Rouge.
And what of the two schools that remained viable in some form almost throughout the duration of the storm? One, Tulane University (LA), ran a blog updated daily by President Scott Cowen, keeping visitors abreast of the safety of faculty, staff, and students and of conditions at its campuses. It was hosted on an emergency Web site, which the university’s normal URL redirected site visitors to. After the disaster, Tulane moved temporary operations to Houston and held online chats with Cowen so that he could respond to fears and questions from the public (no, emergency power hasn’t been maintained at the medical school, which means research has been disrupted; and, yes, formal rush for sororities will take place—in the springtime). The university has also provided a continuous and unbroken chain of updates via its Web site.
The New Orleans campus of Louisiana State University (with its main campus in Baton Rouge) also remained live online through most of the storm onslaught and disastrous aftermath. The institution posted an emergency notice to its Health Sciences Center Web site, lsuhsc.edu, stating that the academic campus for LSUHSC in downtown New Orleans had suspended operations and that “hospital personnel should follow Code Gray procedures and instructions from hospital leadership.” It also advised Blackberry ( www.blackberry.com) subscribers that they could use their devices as a means of e-mail communication, “in the event we lose our Exchange servers during Hurricane Katrina.”
When Is a Disaster Too Catastrophic?
Although many have argued that the proportions of the Katrina disaster (a Category 4/5 hurricane accompanied by no end of additional and devastating complications) went far beyond a scale that can be planned for, others insist that the tools of disaster recovery planning (DRP) aren’t necessarily prohibitive in terms of dollar or time investment, nor do they need to be highly complex.
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