September 2007 — Features
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Disaster Recovery :: Courting Disaster
Districts that are not prepared in the event of fire, storm, earthquake, or whatever else nature may bear are asking for trouble.
AS HURRICANE CHARLEY BORE DOWN ON
Port Charlotte, FL, in the summer of 2004, Charlotte County
Public Schools' Chris Bress made sure the small steps were
taken as well as the big ones. The district had already put itself
through a dry run six months earlier, an event that included the
police and fire departments, EMS, and the local hospitals, and
had equipped its staff with new 800 MHz radios, knowing that
cell phones would fail. But Bress, Charlotte County's director of
technology, was attempting to leave nothing to chance.
"When we knew Charley was going to hit, we told everyone to put plastic bags over their monitors and CPUs," he says. "People laughed and said the wind would blow the bags off the computers, but I told them the bags would stop water from falling on the computers when the ceilings fell in."
Score one for Bress. The ceilings did fall in, and due to his forethought, the computers were spared.
It was one of many successes for Bress and the district, whose painstaking disaster recovery planning helped get Charlotte County operational only two weeks after the hurricane struck. "Other school districts that had much less damage took much longer to open back up," Bress says.
BE PREPARED
DRAWING UP A DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN? CONSIDER A FEW TIPS FROM TECHNOLOGY SERVICE PROVIDER CDW-G.
- Develop a strategy for tracking all IT assets. If disaster strikes, the administration will be able to locate staff members and equipment rapidly.
- Plan for a daily check-in with the IT support team in the event of a disruption. By discussing priorities, data center and tech-support employees stay in sync.
- Implement backup systems to ensure there is no single point of failure.
- Require IT staff to create multiple backups and approaches to retrieving district data.
- Create a contingency plan well in advance of an emergency situation.
- Execute disaster recovery and business continuity plans through organized drills.
Still, Charley took its toll, exposing miscalculations or oversights in the district's plan, in particular an underestimating of the scale of the destruction. Bress says the district anticipated a more localized disaster. "Our plan addressed losing one school, but we lost six, to the point where they would never be able to open their doors again—a total of one-third of our district in the span of one hour."
Bress estimates the cost to the school district at about $300 million, about $2 million of which was in the destruction of hardware and network infrastructure. "The amount of damage was unbelievably massive," he says.
