Is Your I.T. Department Prepared for the Worst?

In September of last year I wrote a post about I.T. crisis planning in an emergency situation, more specifically about hurricane season.

The same theory applies now that the U.S. is experiencing Snowpocalypse, record levels of snowfall spread across the nation. In the event of an emergency, is your I.T. Department prepared for worst?

The growing dependency on technology in the last 5 years has created an ever-growing need to keep servers up and running, and unfortunately disaster recovery plans may not be as up-to-date as they should be, given the lack of funding due to the recession. Looking forward, we need to have a crisis plan ready in case of an emergency situation.

While most I.T. related positions are easily set up to work from home, some do not have that luxury. Certain departments may be required to work on-site even during emergency situations to provide support. Remote administration is key for everyone in order to maintain support in an emergency situation.

To best prepare for the upcoming hurricane season, it is critical that you…

• Update contact lists with phone numbers and e-mail addresses of vendors, key workers and executives.
• Identify critical applications and establish the recovery point objectives for each.
• Notify key employees of their assignments in case a primary location goes offline because of a storm.
• Take snapshots of server configurations, and ensure that bare metal restores can be performed at alternate disaster recovery sites.
• E-mail critical business units to notify them of the steps that have been taken to ensure that their processes will remain up in case of an outage in primary facilities.
• Consider having manual procedures in place to continue business functions in case of an extended data center disruption