Recovery Vendors Pitch in for Hurricane Rita Preparation - ' Smart Planning '

Solution providers can work with clients to proactively develop a plan of survival. Tamp Computer Systems, for example, has software designed to help customers create a disaster recovery plan, said Tom Abruzzo, president and CEO of the Merrick, N.Y.-based developer and consulting firm.

Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPAA, in conjunction with this year's hurricane season, are forcing some organizations to put well-thought out plans in place, he said. About 60 percent of clients purchase the software and do the planning themselves, with the remainder selecting Tamp's consulting services, said Abruzzo.

Using the software, businesses come up with a recovery timeframe objective, develop a business impact analysis and write a plan to meet that target, he said. The plan includes disaster declaration procedures, notification to plan participants, creation of recovery teams, emergency procedures and contacts, identification of mission-critical operating specifications (such as SLAs and operating sites), a plan to rebuild and restore inventory and a glossary of terms, Abruzzo said.

"[Companies] really should talk to their line-of-business folks [to find out] how long of an outage can they sustain," said Braunstein. "If you can't service your customers for a day, with they still remain your customers? How about two days? A week? Two weeks? The line-of-business people know this—or at least they should. Business continuance [plans] must be owned by line-of-business."

In addition, corporations should know what the type of disastrous scenario not covered in the plan, he noted. Taking these steps can save millions, if not billions, of dollars.

"A trend we are seeing in action today, with Hurricane Katrina, is customers who chose to move towards an information availability solution that allowed them to keep their information up and available and get their people connected as soon as possible, despite interruption," said SunGard's Palermo. "They did this by implementing a blended solution that protected their data and people with disaster recovery planning, missed with solutions such as server, application, data and Website hosting. With this type of plan in place, they were able to recover in a matter of hours, not days, because their most critical applications and data were already protected with SunGard and it was just a matter of getting their people to a safe recovery location and providing them, via a network connection, with the most up-to-date data."

Surge in Calls

Following each disaster or before expected events, such as Hurricane Rita, disaster recovery and backup companies experience a surge in calls from harried IT managers and business owners.

"We have had several hundred calls in the last week," said NovaStor's Andrews. "Over the last few days—almost since Katrina—we've been receiving phone calls from people who wanted data back up."

But, until businesses buck the status quo, the spike will be short-lived, and companies will continue to suffer preventable loss due to inertia.