President Obama goes in and tells his staff, "I have good news and bad news. First the good news . . . there "is" a God. The bad news is that he’s destroying the Earth in 3 days."

Kim Jung Il goes back and tells his staff, "I have bad news and more bad news. The first is . . . there "is" a God. The second is he’s destroying the Earth in 3 days."

Bill Gates goes back and tells his staff, "I have good news and good news. First . . . God thinks I am one of the three most important people in the world. Second . . . you don't have to fix the bugs in Windows Vista.

I have updated this joke three times in the last ten years.  It was originally told back in the late 90‘s and used Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Gates and Windows 98.  As they say “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  And did anyone else notice that Bill Gates retired right about the time that Vista was really making people mad?  Ironic to say the least...

As You will start to see, I have a number of issues with Microsoft and Bill Gates.  The biggest one is that I am Just unbelievably jealous at the marketing genius that company employed for more than two decades....  We should only be so lucky.....  Anyway you and I don’t have the luxury of fading off into the sunset with our $50 Billion like Bill did....  

We have to get up every day and make sure that it all runs the way it should.  That includes making sure that we’ve thought of how we can keep the business running without access to our main facilities.

Ok --- So here goes...  Ready?

Quick! -- Give me the five things you need to do if you can’t
get back into the main office for two weeks.

Did you pause.....  Are you stumped?  Come on -- seriously?

What if the State Health Department shows up on a Tuesday afternoon and says:

“Sorry, three employees and five customers have been diagnosed with H1N1.  One of the people who visited this branch last week died this morning. We’re closing down the building until we can get a handle on how bad it is.”

I know, everyone is beating this “Swine Flu” thing to death.  But the reality of it is our friends at the World Health Organization just this week declared the first world Pandemic in 57 years over the spread of this bug.

What will happen next flu season is a big question mark.  No one has any idea whether we should be worried.  But do you really want to leave it to chance?

The way I see it we’ve been given a breather.  Mexico basically shut down an entire nation and economy because some people caught a bad cold and died.  More people died in car accidents during the same time period...

Look, any human death is a tragedy, but how much more tragedy did they cause when they “turned the switch off” on the entire Mexican economy.  

A leading business group in Mexico estimated that canceled events and closure of movie theaters, night clubs, museums and other venues was costing Mexico City at least $57 million a day.  Personally -- I bet that number is a little light.

Believe me, anybody with a rudimentary understanding of economics shudders at the thought of widespread business closures.  I know I do!

All right --- I’ll concede that the “Swine Flu” keeping you out of your building is remote.  But let’s concentrate on what I’m really trying to get at.  

What happens if you can’t go to work?  What happens if your staff doesn’t have a desk or teller window to sit behind?  What if your customers can’t bring in their deposits or you can’t receive their payments.  

Loss of the ability to maintain commerce & Loss of client and employee confidence.  
THERE’S THE REAL DISASTER!

When we in the DR(Disaster Recovery) Business, specifically in technology systems, start building a plan for a customer the first question we ask is “What’s your disaster?”  

That’s when we get the blank look.  Everyone stops ---- kind of looks around ---- then goes “What?”
What is your disaster?  That has to be the starting point for putting a plan in place.  If you don’t know what the disaster, outage, event is --- how are you going to plan for it?
The way you respond to a short-term power outage is not the same way you’ll need to respond to a long-term closure of your main branch or office.  We always suggest that everyone look at three possible levels of technology systems outages.

Localized and Short Duration
Localized and Extended Duration
Widespread and Extended Duration

We have a great client that is located right in the central part of the US --- good’ol Tornado Alley.  They’ve spent the last twenty five years building a $150 Million business.  That business just happens to be supplying the critical components to many of the major consumer goods manufacturers in the world.  We started working with them in early 2004.  

We’ve worked really hard over the last 5 years making sure that their servers and network are always on.  Because if their systems are down, they can’t bill for the widgets that make them $400,000 a day.  Losing the ability to make that kind of money for a couple of days is a really big deal.

One of the things that we’ve tried to get them to do is connect their data room to a diesel generator.  With that in place, if the power goes out at the corporate office at least the remote facilities can still process orders ---- Continue To Service The Client...  You know, the little things.  Well for one reason or another we have never been able to get a generator installed.  

A couple of weeks ago there was a really bad thunderstorm that went through their town.  The Central Plains have those occasionally.  One of the transformers that provide the life blood of the digital age --- electricity --- to their corporate office got hit by lightening.  The corporate office, some of the production, and all of the distribution for this group were down.  Just a whole bunch of people “Sweating Like Mad” in the Central Plains Heat.   No widgets being produced, no clients being served.

Now this event could have fallen into two of the categories of outage.  As it turns out they didn’t have electricity for about 5 hours of a normal business day(they were without power for a total of about 14 hours).  That put it into the level of “Localized and Short Duration.”  Had the utility not been able to get a power to them by just bypassing the transformer it could have easily been “Localized and Long Duration.”

You’re probably thinking “14 hours?  That seems like a pretty long duration to me.”  And for your group it might be.  These are very company specific concepts.  But for a company that has 250 employees with 5 facilities in four states, moving manufacturing and processing in another facility would take days to ramp up.

And once you start the process of enacting your “Business Continuity Plan,” you get to a point where a complex plan can’t just be stopped.  You may cause yourself more problems than if you just waited another few hours to see if the situation corrects itself.

So here’s where the “Business Continuity Planning”  cycle has to start --- ask yourself:
“What’s my disaster?”
“How Long Can I Be Unavailable to My Clients?”

Make Sure You Backup Daily.....

Brian S. Marcuzzo