CIOs Ponder Potential Pandemic

IT managers could face a major challenge finding the staff to keep their systems up and running in the wake of an avian flu outbreak, according to Professor Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center For Disaster Preparedness.

Speaking at an event in New York today, Redlener warned IT managers of the risks they face and slammed the U.S. government for its lack of avian flu preparedness. "Disaster planning itself is a disaster. If the federal government worked for your business you would fire them," he said. "There's tremendous confusion around state, local, and federal agencies."

Avian flu, which is also known as H5N1, has claimed over 100 victims, mainly in Asia. At the moment, it is difficult for one person to pass the virus to another, although there are fears that H5N1 could mutate, causing a global pandemic reminiscent of the 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed 20 million people around the world.

Redlener, who is based at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York, warned that the U.S. healthcare system, in particular, will struggle to cope with a major outbreak of the deadly virus. With 46 million Americans without access to health insurance, he added, this will leave many thousands of "Typhoid Mary-types" wandering the streets.

In New York City alone, according to Redlener, some 250,000 people could be hospitalized out of a population of around 7 million, and the virus could cause over 60,000 deaths.Against this backdrop, Redlener warned CIOs to expect absentee rates of up to 35 percent, and he advised execs to build this into their disaster recovery plans. "They should be thinking about how their data will be available in a situation like this," he said, urging managers to make sure that staff are on hand to manage and secure data centers.

One director of information systems at a New York-based financial firm, who asked not to be named, admitted that getting access to back-end servers and storage could be a problem with key staff out sick. "Hopefully, we will be able to remotely access it from our homes to manage it, but if I have to press a button on a server, that could be when we run into problems," he said.

The exec explained that his firm has already set up remote access to its data centers via a virtual private network (VPN). The director explained that his company also keeps copies of its data at three separate sites and stores records in a former missile silo at an unnamed location. "We would have to have three geographically dispersed disasters over a 100-mile radius to affect the data," he said.

But the director, who had first-hand experience of 9/11, added that he now keeps N95 dust masks, which are specially designed to block dangerous airborne particles, on hand at all times: "I keep a stockpile of them in the data center. It can't protect our data, but it can protect us."

Another publicity-shy IT manager from a Canadian service provider is also worried about whether he will have enough healthy staff to run his data centers in the event of a pandemic. "That's a concern. We want to have mobility," he says, adding that his firm has already identified which members of staff will fulfill this role.The other big issue facing firms is how to cope with a large number of staff suddenly working from home if a pandemic breaks out. Roseann McSorley, managing director for business continuity management at Deutsche Bank AG , tells Byte and Switch that she used last year's New York transit strike to test the firm's ability to cope with large numbers of employees logging on remotely. "It was one of the opportunities that we had to take, and that lets you prepare," she said. "But the biggest challenge is making sure that staff are aware and prepared."

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch