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Computerworld - Ah, the good old days. Planning for disaster recovery, if it occurred at all, was one of the easier things an IT manager had to do.

Youd back up your mainframe to tape every night or over the weekend. If you were really conscientious, youd send the tapes off-site and arrange for contingency processing at some other data center. Testing your recovery plan? Youd retrieve the tapes and see if you could read them.

Of course, things have gotten steadily more complicated over the years, with distributed and networked computers, n-tier computing, heterogeneous hardware and operating systems, virtualization, automated data feeds from external parties and more.

Adding to the confusion has been a steady change in the meaning of disaster. Ten years ago, a four-hour outage might not have even been noticed by users or customers; today, it could cost you your job.

As a result, it has become vastly more difficult to prepare and test disaster recovery plans, and increasingly unlikely that you will go to bed at night feeling 100% sure that all your IT assets are protected.

Companies are dealing with these challenges in various ways. Some are reaching out to external parties for help with disaster recovery planning and hot sites, to which computer processing can be moved quickly in an emergency. Others have pulled back from these arrangements, saying they can better handle the complexity of disaster recovery in-house. Still others are essentially redefining disaster recovery by substituting notions of disaster avoidance.

Jerry Grochow, CIO at MIT, illustrates the problem this way: I once counted a dozen different boxes that had to be up for [an application] to work from end to end, and thats not unusual. So you ask your SAP application programmer, Whats necessary to recover your system? and you dont necessarily get the full picture, because the programmer doesnt realize that the authentication server needs to be running so someone can even log on, and its running in a different data center.

Not only are an organizations IT assets no longer all located in a cozy glass room with a raised floor, they may not even be under the control of the IT department. Grochow recalls an earlier job at a brokerage firm that got automated data feeds from 40 external suppliers, noting that some financial institutions have 100 such connections. How to recover a major data processing application when you have that many feeds is extremely complicated, he says.

The challenges are legion.

Schneider National Inc. in Green Bay, Wis., at one time contracted with a service provider for a disaster recovery hot site but recently decided to set up its own second data center to serve as a recovery facility. Ours is a very complex and highly integrated technology environment, says Paul Mueller, vice president of technology services at the trucking company, which has 36 locations in North America. As complexity has increased, so has the difficulty associated with hot-site recovery.