September 2007 — Features
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Disaster Recovery :: Courting Disaster
What's needed is a kind of tech-support triage, because once the storm strikes, Bress says, IT gets pulled in every direction: "No one is as popular as tech support is when things go down."
In particular, Bress says, he and his staff "didn't take into consideration how much other departments would need us." He describes how the magnitude of the destruction that Charley wrought forced the district to change its priorities on the fly. Restoring service to the payroll department became an immediate priority, so people could get paid. "As long as their software and hardware is working, we normally never hear from payroll with respect to paychecks," Bress says. "We had to disassemble all of their equipment and move it north until we could find a secure location and steady power."
The transportation division also was moved up to the front of the line. Transportation plans had to be changed for more than 17,000 students, many of whom had never been on a school bus before because they attended neighborhood schools. "Our transporation department could not even look up the home addresses of students, let alone change their schedules," Bress says, "because their offices were located right in the middle of the destruction zone. We had to disassemble all of their equipment as well and move them to an adjunct transportation facility on the other side of town. They were anxious to get to work, but they couldn't start until we got them hooked back up."
An Enterprise Model
As part of their planning for more than the obvious disasters, some school districts are lifting their approach from the business realm, building and maintaining healthy, strong, and flexible disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
"Since Katrina, there has been more heightened priority in having a disaster recovery plan," says Eric Schott, director of product management at data storage systems vendor EqualLogic in Nashua, NH. In education, Schott explains, similar to business, "an IT person is always matching the [district's] services needs against the threat of the service and business objectives of an organization. In that respect, an IT person in K-12 is no different from an IT person in a smallto- medium business."
