Disaster recovery: is it the new Y2K?

One year after September 11, disaster recovery is still high in the minds of executives in Western countries.

By Paul Montgomery

Pat Gambaro is not a name you would have had reason to know before September 11, 2001. He isn't a counter-terrorist agent, he was merely the CIO at the New York Board of Trade when its entire head office building was destroyed as one of the World Trade Centre towers fell on it.

The fact that, due to Gambaro's foresight in investing in backup infrastructure, the NYBOT was able to recover sufficiently to be able to resume operations 12 hours later has made Gambaro a poster boy for disaster recovery. His story fills the first part of a new book sponsored by storage hardware giant Veritas entitled The Resilient Enterprise, and he is highly valued as a corporate speaker these days.

The story is a Boy's Own tale of tragedy and triumph, but how relevant is it to the everyday lives of information managers half a world away? IT departments have only just recovered from the frenzied rush to stamp out the year 2000 bug, and the current deflated economic conditions have made budgets thin enough. What's more, many companies which didn't spend a lot on Y2K compliance, particularly in Asian countries, didn't seem to experience many adverse effects, which might make IT spenders wary of swallowing what they would perceive as snake oil.

Paul Massiglia, US-based technical director of engineering at Veritas, said the chill of fear that went through the IT industry after the September 11 terrorist attacks was different to the hysteria over the Y2K bug.

Massiglia, who was co-editor of The Resilient Enterprise, said the main effect of September 11 in IT circles was to raise consciousness in users' minds about the benefits of business resiliency.

"Y2K happened, it came and then it went," he said. "Disaster recovery is different, because we don't know when or what it will be. There won't be a December 31, when the clock is going to tick down, and everyone can then breathe a sigh of relief."Harry Christian, marketing director for Network Appliance in Australia and NZ, said that spending on disaster recovery efforts was not on par with the levels of awareness amongst users.

"When you look at the top tier enterprise customers in Australia, the banks amongst others, these guys have always had disaster recovery in place, like redundant systems they can use in case of emergency. September 11 certainly highlighted the need to go back and take stock," he said. "Where the awareness has hit home is in the small to medium enterprise customers who may or may not have had disaster recovery in place."When asked whether the current push for disaster recovery could be undermined by IT managers who remember spending a lot of money on Y2K and feeling that it was a waste of money, Massiglia likened the spending to buying insurance.

"It's a waste of money in the sense that insurance is a waste of money," he said. "If you don't spend money on [disaster recovery], you have elected to face the consequences."

Christian admitted there was a degree of scepticism from the user side amongst the hype from storage vendors, but that disaster recovery was a "matter of fact proposition" that was different from Y2K.

"It's all about the risk you want to take," he said. "If you think about Y2K and the countries where they spent a lot of money, if you spoke to companies in those countries before Y2K, they said we feel good about spending this money, because it's insurance. It's easy in hindsight."

Massiglia said the main lesson he took from the NYBOT experience was that users, "don't have a good appreciation of what goes into making an enterprise resilient." He urged those IT managers who were looking at disaster recovery projects to seek out the help of professional organisations like Disaster Recovery Institute International, and the Contingency Planning & Management Group.