Businesses need to keep going even when faced with torrential flooding or earthquakes. Sysadmins who lived through Katrina, Sandy, and other disasters share real-world advice for anyone responsible for IT during an emergency.
When the lights flicker and the wind howls like a locomotive, it’s time to put your business continuity and disaster recovery plans into operation.
Too many sysadmins report that neither were in place when the storms came. That’s not surprising. In 2014, the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council found that 73 percent of surveyed businesses worldwide didn’t have adequate disaster recovery plans.
“Adequate” is a key word. As a sysadmin on Reddit wrote in 2016, “Our disaster plan is a disaster. All our data is backed up to a storage area network [SAN] about 30 miles from here. We have no hardware to get it back online or have even our core servers up and running within a few days. We’re a $4 billion a year company that won’t spend a few $100K for proper equipment. Or even some servers at a data center. Our executive team said, ‘Meh what are the odds of anything happening’ when the hardware proposal was brought up.”
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