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January 14, 2002

Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst

In a risk-filled world, planning for disaster is the most intelligent move you can make

by Justin Kestelyn

In a period of history in which business risk has reached its highest level in decades, what would better indicate an intelligent enterprise than its deployment of a dynamic, ongoing strategy to ensure business continuity under the worst possible conditions?

Look no further for an example than Cantor Fitzgerald LP, the dominant municipal bond-trading outfit that was decimated in the Sept. 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Despite losing its WTC offices and nearly 700 people — more than two-thirds of its entire U.S. workforce — the company's bond-trading system was ready for business on September 13. Why? Because Cantor's IT and business management, anticipating a worst-case scenario, had a comprehensive disaster recovery solution in place. Management clearly understood that Cantor's world turns on its information, so its information has to be protected at all costs. (Tragically, those managers had no means of including themselves and Cantor employees in such a plan.)

Other WTC-based businesses certainly either had no plan at all, or more tragically, had relied too much on technology at the expense of employee training: Perhaps the systems were in place for timely data recovery, but no human experts were alive to make them work. Therein lies the difference between "disaster recovery" and "business continuity."

NUMBERS DON'T LIE

A recent InformationWeek (Nov. 26, 2001) survey of 250 IT and business managers, which was managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, highlights some interesting trends and perceptions in this area. For example:

Six in 10 respondents said that "time constraints" serve as a barrier to proper business continuity planning.
More than 25 percent of participants claimed to have invoked their plan in the last year, yet 40 percent expect it would take "days or longer" to recover lost or damaged enterprise data. Seven percent aren't sure they could recover it at all. (Which raises the question: What kind of business continuity plan is that?)
Twelve percent said that IT "owns" their business continuity plan while 40 percent said that business management does. However, the plurality of respondents (more than 30 percent) said that IT "maintains" that plan.

These figures suggest some common shortcomings among business continuity plans, some of which are addressed in this issue's cover story by enterprise storage expert Arun Taneja ("Perpetual Motion Enterprise").

For one, close IT-business alignment, which is typical of intelligent enterprises (Imperative 3: "Align business and IT goals"), is a crucial but commonly overlooked element of business continuity planning. As Taneja explains, you can't assume that all information requires equal protection; doing so will only inflate the challenge of proper planning, as well as its expense.

Clearly, business and IT functions must collaborate in order to carefully organize the "time to recovery" hierarchy of enterprise applications. For example, how quickly would your CRM system or data warehouse need to be back online? More quickly than your transaction systems, less quickly, or at the same time? How much historical customer data do you want to preserve through a catastrophe? Just barely enough to support customer-service reps, or a sufficiently large amount for extensive time-based analysis? These decisions can't be made without close cooperation between business and IT.

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As important as it is, this insight only serves to support Taneja's main point: that "bulletproof" storage infrastructure is the basis of any proper business continuity plan. To be more specific, there's little point in having a replication strategy if the information infrastructure involved is not robust. Why rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

ONE STEP BEYOND

Anticipating disaster does not come naturally to human beings, but where data availability is involved, a "pessimist" is an optimist with information. You owe it to your business, customers and employees included, to keep the information flowing — no matter what.