Crisis Management International

So you’ve set up offsite storage with a respected data provider. Maybe you even have a data mirror somewhere else. You have probably even set up a recovery time objective and an interim manual process.

Now, shut off your computer, and try to do business for the amount of time specified in your recovery time objective. It may work for a while, but untested manual processes often break down.

Maybe you work for a big company that has redundant failover systems offsite in case of a crash. But if you can’t get to that data, it might as well be on your crashed servers. What if your ISP goes down? Or an even more common scenario - you lose power. Do you have redundant power feeds for all your systems? Can your backup power provide service for an extended outage? Have these sytems been tested?

You have backup power, redundant systems, manual processes, redundant Internet connections. You’ve spent money and manhours making sure that you’ll have your data, and access to necessary systems in any foreseeable situation. Your IT group has even tested the systems, and they’ve performed flawlessly.

You still may not be protected. While all of these things are good steps in an overall disaster recovery process, they’re still flawed. Why? Because most IT disaster recovery tests take place in a vacuum. Very few companies are willing to risk downtime by actually shutting down a system for any length of time. So while your tests may seem valid, when the real disaster hits, they may not perform as expected. Also, if the end-users of your systems must do anything outside of their normal activities to make the recovery successful, you may find that long-ago training has been forgotten, or that even worse, some staff have never been trained at all.

CMI has helped hundreds of companies deal with thousands of crises. Our unique combination of crisis management experience and disaster recovery expertise gives us a high level of knowledge regarding the real risks your organization might face. If you don’t have a detailed disaster recovery plan, we can help you prepare one. If you already have a disaster recovery plan, we can provide plan review services and training programs to help ensure its success. We can also help you integrate your diaster recovery plan into a comprehensive crisis management plan that addresses your organization’s entire response.