Sept 11: An attack on disaster recovery complacency - News - Security

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Sept 11: An attack on disaster recovery complacency

By Nicole Bellamy, ZDNet Australia
December 05, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Sept-11-An-attack-on-disaster-recovery-complacency/0,130061744,120262204,00.htm

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in the US, and the subsequent war against terrorism, CIOs are placing a high priority on business continuity planning in order to protect people, facilities and information, according to experts.

Mike Reuttgers, chairman of storage vendor EMC, discussed the rising adoption of business continuity planning at Oracle's OpenWorld 2001 event, today. According to Reuttgers, post September 11, companies have become increasingly concerned about the safety of employees, facilities and information resources.

Reuttgers explained that prior to the US attacks, most organisations employed very basic disaster recovery techniques without allocating high levels of resources or budgets to these processes and systems.

He listed the common disaster recovery process for organisations as:

Unopened disaster recovery plans
Disaster recovery sites
Tape-based recovery

The attack on the World Trade Centre, and its impact on businesses both within the building itself and around the world, has led to an increased awareness that these processes are not adequate to cope with disaster of this scale.

"Clearly the backup strategies that we had previously are not going to work in this new environment," said Reuttgers. "And the CIOs are aware of it."

A recent Information Week survey, cited by Reuttgers, revealed sixty percent of respondents intend to assess all aspects of IT disaster preparedness throughout the next twelve months.

With an increasing awareness of the need for business continuity, especially in the wake of a disaster, many CIOs and senior managers are driving changes to internal disaster recovery plans as part of overarching business continuity strategies.

"I have not been into any corporation [since September 11] that does not have a task force working because one hundred percent [of CIOs] are worried about these kinds of things today," said Reuttgers.

Reuttgers believes this increased awareness of, and focus on, business continuity planning will lead to more developed strategies. He explained that post September 11, CIOs should be looking at implementing these processes:

Business continuity planning review
Expanded definition of 'mission critical'
Remote sites for human resources, as well as backup servers
Future thoughts and implementing 'dark' data centres which do not require physical access, nor staff.

Nicole Bellamy travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.