The Power of Three-Dimensional Thinking in Disaster Recovery

September 11, 2024 Richard Dolewski

The flow of information and commerce means around-the-clock access to “data” because business never sleeps. The transformative impact of today’s generative AI is shaping unparalleled customer expectations, driving consumers’ appetite for unmatched levels of digital infrastructure availability and self-service.

IT must think in terms of resilience, operational continuity, and data protection to support today’s digital transformation. We must keep pace with the speed and needs of today’s economic climate, with an emphasis on security and resiliency.

“Data Center Down.” These dreaded words are something business leaders never want to hear. Losing your cloud or on-premise engine room underlying business operations is a critical failure in service delivery. How much data can you afford to lose without a significant loss in revenue? How long can you afford to be without your applications? How long will customers wait?

The answer to these vital business questions will drive priorities in your business continuity management program. Data is the backbone of organizations today. Information is a corporation’s most valuable asset. When data is lost, held for ransom, or simply unavailable, it negatively affects (and potentially halts) all desired business outcomes.

Business Continuity:

The ability to continue business operations in the midst of a technical disaster.
Keeping the business lights on as usual, transaction orders moving, no matter what the day brings.

Disaster Recovery:

The ability to provide business resiliency by ensuring continuous access to applications and data during a technical outage.

The Two-Dimensional View of BC/DR

Learn from the past to embrace the future. How do we improve at driving repeatable results in our BC/DR program? How do we take technical, and business lessons learned to drive positive insights going forward? Business and IT must draw on past experiences while also understanding the uniqueness of today’s business landscape to create a solid future roadmap. This means setting objectives to transform and keep pace with change in this digital era. This framework must be applied to every aspect of a business, notably technology, innovation, staffing, risk, and compliance.

Information availability means maintaining the connection between an organization’s critical business information and the people who need it to keep the business running. Today, more than ever, businesses, emergency services, supply chains, and government agencies require uninterrupted access to information to maintain their key business processes. Business, technology, and your employees together drive positive organizational delivery.

One important factor often overlooked in BC/DR planning is the issue of staffing, particularly IT staff, as employees must balance the needs of home and work. Do they focus on a system failover or rush home to evacuate and attend to family concerns? In this case, employees have two CEOs. Their corporate CEO is asking for “All HANDS On DECK” to get the business up and running versus their family CEO “Spouse “seeking help addressing issues at home.

The Third Dimensional View – Addressing IT Staff Work And Home Emergency Needs

This approach involves careful consideration of your IT staffing strategies to ensure that the necessary expertise will be available to deliver the technical components of a disaster recovery plan. In this vein, craft a strategy bearing in mind that your team members may only be available intermittently during a local outage or FEMA major event due to family concerns. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of having a staff emergency preparedness program. https://www.ready.gov/plan.

For example, one successful DR plan I authored included documented logistics for caring for IT staff families during a weather emergency. This involved transporting them out of a pending hurricane zone, where the company’s office was located, to a safe area 300 miles away with accommodations, food, and access to all necessities. As a result, the IT staff flew to the high availability failover site and ran operations without direct concern for their family’s well-being. Remember to consider the human elements in advance and how you may best address them to drive success.

Human behavior during any emergency is the critical factor in determining the ultimate success or failure of your disaster response. During an actual emergency in the workplace, employees can either be part of the problem or part of the solution. Organizations can influence how employees will respond during an emergency by taking several important steps before a disaster strikes.

Train staff in building a family preparedness plan:

Provide staff training for crisis scenarios (i.e., IT ransom) or disaster scenarios (FEMA Event)
Promote personal and family preparedness
Demonstrate how to assemble a small emergency kit (GO BAG)
Raise awareness of plans and procedures
Incorporate Disaster Preparedness into ongoing safety initiatives
Include employees in drills and exercises

Team leaders in BC/DR must remember to emphasize that the purpose of emergency exercises is to “test plans, not people.” Practice doesn’t make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect! Include everyone, not just key players, in conducting emergency drills and exercises.

Business leaders and general employees do not speak the language of IT. Start thinking in terms of business interruptions and the financial impact of systems availability. Yes, IT must plan for the worst, but they must also plan for the more likely scenarios that deliver IT resiliency. IT and Business Management must both work on keeping your business healthy regardless of any downtime event. Never ignore the truth about your level of DR readiness, and your staffing needs to deliver the recovery within the stated objectives.

Disaster Recovery is your last line of defense against severe business impact, regardless of the circumstances. Will the BC/DR Plan work as written, or does it require super-human intervention? Remember the 3Cs in BC/DR planning methodology: Keep your plan current, keep your plan complete, and keep your plan comprehensive. But no recovery is possible without the people. Ensure your BC/DR plan has home emergency preparedness built in. That’s the third dimension many BCM programs fail to address, which is important for success.

Richard Dolewski is Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Solutions at LightEdge.

This content is sponsored by Connectria a LightEdge Company.

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