Panel Ponders Preparedness

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Storage World Conference -- Earthquakes, hurricanes, and tape destruction were all on the agenda here this week as CIOs and IT managers discussed their plans for the unexpected, but only a handful, it appears, have taken precautions to deal with a possible Avian Flu epidemic.

Alex Chang, systems engineering supervisor at Newport Beach, Calif.-based Hoag Hospital, who took part in a disaster recovery panel, told Byte and Switch that the possible pandemic is on his technology radar. "We can operate remotely if Avian Flu hits," he said. "We need a minimum amount of people."

Chang has already built secure remote access to key hospital systems through the likes of VPN and Citrix technologies, enabling his staff to work from home in the event of a pandemic.

But Chang and another panelist, Charles Curtis, senior storage engineer of Houston, Texas-based Stewart Transaction Solutions may be in a minority. During the discussion, Curtis asked the audience whether they had made any specific plans for an Avian Flu outbreak. No hands were raised.

"By the time it happens, it's too late," warned the exec, whose firm has already made contingency plans for an outbreak. By the time it is on the news, he added, almost 70 percent of workers could be staying at home.To cope with the likes of Avian Flu, Curtis has already taken precautions to ensure that IT skills are still available onsite, even if key staff are out sick. Some of the firm's systems are normally run by application development programmers, but Curtis has trained a group of IT managers to take over in the event of a disaster. "When you're getting into real disaster recovery, you have to account for losing people in your group, and having documentation that other people can actually read," he explained.

Avian Flu (also known as H5N1) has claimed more than 100 victims, mainly in Asia. At the moment, it is difficult for one person to pass the virus to another, but there are fears that H5N1 could mutate and cause a global pandemic reminiscent of the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed 20 million people around the world. (See CIOs Ponder Potential Pandemic.)

Earlier this year, a top U.S. disaster-preparedness expert warned that firms could face a major challenge in finding the staff to keep their systems up and running in the wake of an Avian Flu outbreak -- and vendors are now targeting users' pandemic fears. (See Suppliers Prep for Pandemic, IBM Unveils DB2 9, and IBM Prepares for Pandemics.)

Another panelist, Tom Lindblom, CTO of Anaheim, Calif.-based, CKE Restaurants, said his biggest concern is a seismic event. Like Curtis, he has contingency plans to function with a skeleton staff. "We have a business continuity plan that assumes that a minimum number of folks will be available."

Lindblom said that his firm's disaster recovery plan covers both the IT and the non-technical aspects of his business, including its supply chain and customer relations operations. For example, CKE Restaurants marketing analysts will be drafted into the firm's Human Resources department to help ensure that staff get paid in the event of a crisis.As well as discussing their disaster recovery plans, panelists revealed their strategies for averting technology-based "disasters," such as storage security breaches. (See The Year in Insecurity, A Tale of Lost Tapes, Tape Security Trips Up Users, and IT Managers Walk Tape Tightrope.)

James Geis, director of storage solutions at consulting firm Forsythe Solutions Group, and moderator of the panel, urged users to pin vendors down on tape and disk-dive security. Vendors, he said, should be doing "whatever they need to do" to completely destroy a drive that's been taken offline. "That's something that you should be demanding from your storage manufacturer when they are swapping out drives with a replacement technology," he warned. "Even if the drive is inoperable, there could be data that could be resurrected from it."

Lindblom isn't relying on vendors to get rid of unused drives. "We take data extremely seriously, and we believe that it's our responsibility to protect our data." CKE Restaurants uses a facility in Texas to turn its decommissioned disk drives into "confetti."

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch