Expert Asks: Can You Ever Prepare Enough?

With Hurricane Katrina teaching companies valuable lessons about disaster recovery, there barely seemed to be enough time to get it right before Rita slammed the Gulf Coast again. And despite the lessons Katrina taught us, one IT expert is asking: Can you ever prepare enough for disaster?

In a column on the Network Computing website, North Carolina-based IT expert Jonathan Feldman says in the days prior to Katrina, there was a bit of a “why bother?” attitude among both companies and people. In his experience, he says, “It’s human nature to underestimate a threat, no matter how emphatically the potential destruction of that threat is spelled out or graphically depicted. Put more simply, ‘It can't happen to us.’”

But Katrina proves it can, he says, which is why IT managers need to plan for disaster. Although his business wasn’t even directly hit by the hurricane, the fuel shortage caused by the disaster affected it, he says.

“Once we analyzed the provisioning requirements, we determined that we simply didn't have time to install a VPN client on every employee's machine, so we opted to use a Web-based service, GoToMyPC, with centralized management and good encryption, under a 30-day trial,” Feldman says of his own DR plan. “We survived, but many on the Gulf Coast didn't.”

Instead, Feldman urges IT managers to learn the “unwelcome but essential lessons” of Katrina, including understanding that the consequences of underpreparation are always worse than the consequences of overpreparation, and that no matter how much companies prepare, it still may not be enough.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.nwc.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1620colfeldman