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Chapter 12:
Network Disaster Recovery
the Y2K event and the anniversary of the WTO demonstrations. Looking at the
preparation made for those events and comparing it to what happens during
unplanned events such as the earthquake helps to illustrate some important
principles about IT disaster recovery and disaster preparedness.
Never Assume
During the preparation for Y2K, members of my staff were asked to augment
the staff normally assigned to support the EOC's desktop and laptop PCs, and
printers. The staff members who normally support the EOC are from a different IT
organization than ours, and as can be expected, their way of doing things differed
from ours for a number of valid reasons. However, once my staff members had
a chance to look at the EOC's environment, they were able to share some new
perspectives and methods that were welcomed and adopted by EOC support
staff, and all involved had a new idea of what would be expected to be the
"standard" way of configuring EOC PCs. Examples ranged from hard-coding
certain models of PC network interface cards (NICs) to run better on the switches
in their wiring closet to developing and implementing a base image for all the
laptops to be deployed in the building. The Y2K event, as a result, was lauded
as an example of ideal cooperation between IT groups and excellent preparation
overall. It was a very calm Saturday morning!
Change Management?
Between events, however, there was a great deal of time and opportunity for
things to change. The facility might have been used for other business purposes;
equipment such as laptops might have been loaned out, or customers could
have come in and used the equipment; and other IT groups besides ours might
have assisted the staff and performed alterations to the configurations that went
undocumented or were not communicated to all involved.
The Results
Whatever it was that might have happened remains unknown. What we did
discover following the earthquake was that when customers who normally use
the EOC in emergency situations went to use the equipment, in some cases the
machines did not work as expected. Software could not be loaded on this PC; that
laptop would not connect to the network anymore; some PCs were not the same
or had been swapped for less-powerful processors. Things had changed, and the
result was that some of the emergency work IT professionals such as web support
technicians, had to perform took more time than we had anticipated. Ironically, the
Web played a crucial role in our overall communications "strategy." The impact
of that equipment not immediately working was not yet evident; however, the
following events illustrate how they might have been.
(Continued)
Summary :
Never Assume During the preparation for Y2K, members of my staff were asked to augment the staff normally assigned to support the EOC's desktop and laptop PCs, and printers. However, once my staff members had a chance to look at the EOC's environment, they were able to share some new perspectives and methods that were welcomed and adopted by EOC support staff, and all involved had a new idea of what would be expected to be the "standard" way of configuring EOC PCs.
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