Yesterday's earthquake (centered in Virginia), along with Monday night's earthquake (centered in Colorado), got me to thinking about disaster preparedness (again).

Lots of IT groups would like to do more in the area of BCP (Business Continuity Planning), but can't get budget due to a management philosophy of "disasters happen elsewhere".   For many of my clients in this situation, these earthquakes are nice "wedge" to demonstrate that disasters do in fact happen close to home - everyone had a bit of a pause today when the buildings, and us inside them, swayed back and forth for a minute.

If you have a good DR (Disaster Recovery Plan) at work, now might be a good time to dust it off to make sure everything still works, while this is still fresh in everyone's mind.  Make sure that your plan truly reflects the needs of your organization.  The IT side of DR is relatively simple - a second location, some servers, replication (often SAN or virtualization based), and you're getting there.  Oh - and failing back to the production site is important (and often overlooked) as well.  

I've seen DR plans go down in flames, where the IT group comes through 100%, all the backup servers are running, but for one reason or another, the company can't do business.  Think things like - where does my main 1-800 telephone number go?  How will we ship?  How will we receive?  There are hundreds of non-IT details that go into a working organization and should go into a good BCP strategy.

Don't neglect DR planning at home as well, there are lots of good references on how to kit your house out for common disasters, but I particularly like the CDC guide on surviving the Zombie Apocalypse ( http://blogs.cdc.gov/publichealthmatters/2011/05/preparedness-101-zombie-apocalypse/ ).  If you can survive that, I'm thinking you're good for anything.

The whole DR topic is seeing real interest due to recent events - please, use our comment form and let us know if the recent earthquakes have shaken things up in your organization, if you are now stirred to consider changes in Disaster Preparedness at work or at home?

http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/22/earthquakes-list-august-23-2011/
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/23/very-strong-and-dangerous-earthquake-rattles-virginia/

http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/22/earthquakes-list-august-22-2011/
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/23/unusually-strong-earthquake-in-colorado-new-mexico-united-states/

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Rob VandenBrink Metafore