Recovery Vendors Pitch in for Hurricane Rita Preparation - ' Many Companies Still Unprepared '

Not Ready for Anything

Despite a barrage of news reports about the wide range of disasters occurring around the globe, many companies are not adequately prepared, industry executives said.

"With every disaster/business interruption we have experienced—from 9/11 to the Northeast blackout to the 2004 hurricane season to Hurricane Katrina—we are still seeing that companies are not adequately prepared for all situations they may encounter," said Palermo. "Typically, we notice that plans tend to be as good as the last interruption an organization has experienced."

While large corporations often have contracts with business-continuity and disaster recovery centers operated by large providers such as IBM Corp. and SunGard, many small and midsize firms either do not have plans in place or rely on tape—a relatively unreliable storage medium, according to some surveys.

"Whether a manmade or natural disaster, the need to recover from an unexpected loss of data is becoming more and more mission-critical," said Brian Anderson, chief marketing officer at Avamar, Irvine, Calif., which developed a scalable solution for enterprise data protection that provides online accessibility, storage and protection of information assets. "What's happened is people have realized disaster recovery is a lot more difficult to do than to talk about. When you start putting it into practice, you find the little things that bite you."

But even if a company has a disaster recovery plan in place, it must test it annually and keep it up-to-date, cautioned Cal Braunstein, chairman, CEO and executive director of research at Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn.-based provider of IT consulting services and research. Businesses also should consider formulating a business continuance plan that encompasses more than IT and data resources, he said.

"In most cases, the backup recovery is better done and better prepared than business continuance. You may have companies that have backup capabilities on their systems and they're working with IBM, SunGard or somebody," Braunstein said. "It really depends on the size of the company: Most of the very large companies have very good disaster recovery plans."

In Hurricane Katrina, a Louisiana university lost 20 years of cancer research, he said. The reason: Most of the data—x-rays, patient files—were not computerized and, therefore, were not backed up. By not considering off-site storage, either online or at a facility hundreds if not thousands of miles away, some companies' best-laid plans were rendered useless, said Anderson.

"With Katrina, we saw the backup tapes of corporations literally floating down Canal Street in New Orleans," he said.

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