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Description
When disaster happens, who is in charge in your city, county, or school? Depending on the severity of a disaster, different areas and groups of employees are affected; however, the information technology department should be among a government's first responders, because it must be ready on a moment's notice to activate a pre-determined alternate site if normal facilities become unavailable.
Disasters can be as small as a few flooded offices, a fire that destroys a room or building, or even a labor dispute, or they can be as extensive as hurricanes or tornadoes. Disasters that shut down a government's mission critical applications for any length of time could have devastating direct and indirect costs to the government and its economy For these kinds of disasters, a disaster recovery and business continuity plan essential. (1)
The first steps the IT department should take depend on how seriously a disaster affects resources. Does it require a few desktops and a room off site to provide a temporary recovery solution? Or does a larger plan need to be activated to move PCs and servers to a "hot site" to restore entire applications and set up temporary work facilities for a limited number of key workers to operate until normalcy is restored?
But what good does it do for IT to restore applications and data if there is no one there to run things? It is only half the solution, albeit the first half. The second half is the contact information for the business continuity piece. Recovering from disaster is less a... |
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