September 2007 — Features
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Disaster Recovery :: Courting Disaster
According to research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, enterprise/ business continuity and disaster recovery spending totaled $15.1 billion in 2006 and is estimated to reach $23.3 billion in 2012. While no figures are available for disaster recovery spending in the K-12 space, anecdotal evidence suggests school districts are upgrading their IT infrastructure with an eye toward minimizing— or even averting—any downtime in the event of a disaster.
"When we developed our disaster recovery plan, we took some cues from the business world," says Keith Price, chief technology officer for Hoover City Schools in Alabama, which fortunately hasn't had to implement its disaster recovery plan yet, despite being near an area known as Tornado Alley. "We consulted with our technology partners to see what they had done with other customers [in different verticals]," Price says. "We wanted to look at their best practices and figure out what worked best for them. I feel like we've had similar results."
Decentralize your data servers. "The problem with centralizing your data is, if you get hit, you lose everything."—Tom Petry, Collier County Schools
"With the way technology has moved, it is becoming more cost-effective for school districts to do what enterprise is doing; the only constraint is the budget," says Renaye Thornborrow, director of marketing at Trillion, a broadband managed service provider for the K-12 market based in Austin, TX. "They are all looking for ways to reduce costs while still being able to provide effective technology."
Granted, school districts and enterprise companies draw up and adhere to different sets of priorities in their disaster recovery plans. But the underlying goals are the same: restore operations as soon as possible, with minimal, if any, loss of data.
In addition, both business and education have to be mindful of the potential leakage of confidential and/or personal data—from unsecured networks after the event, theft of backup tapes, or other similar situations—that could put them in a compromising situation.
Bress says a school district's disaster recovery plan will be different from, say, a financial institution's "because we don't have to carry credit card or other data like that," he explains, noting, still, that the two organizations have more in common than not. "We do have student data and health records. When you're comparing the two, there might be 70 to 80 percent similarity and then 20 percent specific to what you do."
In fact, Bress says the single most important piece of technology in his district's disaster recovery plan was the data backups: "Hardware can be replaced, data can't."
Petry had the foresight to change Collier County's network setup before the district was struck by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. "We had spent a lot of money to decentralize our data servers," he says. "The problem with centralizing your data is, if you get hit, you lose everything." Fortunately, Wilma did little damage to the school district—one wall of a school was destroyed and the landscaping was ruined—but nothing else of any significance.
