Sidebar: Hot Sites Get Heavy Usage

Computerworld - Saint Luke's Health System conducted a test of its disaster recovery procedures in August and planned to do another one late this month, said CIO John Wade. But in a sign of Hurricane Katrina's effect on IT operations, the health care provider's hot-site vendor canceled the September test last week because so many of its other clients have declared disaster situations, Wade said.
Bob DiLossi, manager of SunGard Data Systems Inc.'s crisis management center, said the Wayne, Pa.-based vendor has contracts for disaster recovery services with 146 companies in the area hit by Katrina. Of those, 24 had declared disasters as of Thursday, and 120 had issued disaster alerts, DiLossi said.
SunGard has three emergency data centers in Texas, and it's sending mobile data centers to the Gulf Coast region. In addition, DiLossi said SunGard has been trying to reach out to customers in the New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., areas. But it has had trouble making contact with them because of telecommunications outages.
Belinda Wilson, executive director of business continuity services for the Americas region at Hewlett-Packard Co., said most of the customers seeking HP's help are asking for offices and work areas that they can use. "It's really been tough," she said. "It's just chaos."
The job ahead appears enormous for IT, said Bill Oates, CIO at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc. Disaster planning typically "isn't assuming that you're going to have extended problems" of the sort caused by Katrina, he said.

Read more about Business Continuity in Computerworld's Business Continuity Topic Center.