Gulf Coast storm and floods challenge IT

Computerworld - At 2 a.m. on Aug. 27, two days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Tim Babco grabbed a red binder containing the latest version of SCP Pool Corp.'s disaster recovery plan, put his dog and cat in the car, locked up his house and drove 500 miles from Covington, La., to the company's emergency operations center in Dallas.
Babco, senior director of IT at Covington-based SCP, a $1.3 billion wholesale distributor of swimming pool supplies, had gone through the motions of relocating his operations twice before when hurricanes had threatened neighboring New Orleans. Both of those storms turned out to be near misses, but Babco said this week that the practice runs helped him fine-tune his plan for when the real thing finally hit.
"People would be lying to say these things always go perfectly," Babco said. "But has it succeeded in allowing our business operations to continue to buy, sell and distribute products? It certainly has, and that's what disaster recovery is all about."
However, the kind of disaster recovery planning that Babco did isn't universal -- especially for a calamity as massive as this week's storm. Simon Mingay, a business continuity and disaster recovery analyst at Gartner Inc., said that about 40% of the Fortune 1,000 companies aren't prepared for a regional disaster. And small and midsize businesses are even less ready, he said.
"Obviously, we're looking at a level of devastation here that few would have considered," Mingay said. "But most still believe that these are things that don't happen to them."
Mingay said companies that have prepared properly for disasters, such as SCP, have extensive emergency communications plans, hot sites from which they can continue business operations for an extended period and some level of IT systems redundancy outside of their headquarters region.
But even companies that are well prepared might not take into account a crisis of the magnitude as the one spawned by Katrina and the flooding that followed.
For example, John Wade, CIO at Saint Luke's Health System Inc. in Kansas City, Mo., said his contract with a disaster recovery vendor allows the IT department to work out of a hot-site facility for up to six weeks if necessary. But under the devastation caused by Katrina, the six-week limit could "pose a hardship for our company," Wade said.
Joe Hartman, an application development manager at HydroChem Industrial Services Inc. in the Houston suburb of Deer Park, said the company's disaster recovery plan involves moving its corporate operations to facilities on the north