Thirty minutes after the ground stopped trembling, Michael Curtright was on the phone with SunGard Recovery Services Inc., alerting the service provider that the state of Washington's Department of Information Services could declare an emergency at any time. Curtright had made the call to SunGard only after making sure his building had been safely evacuated. Now the assistant director of computer services for the department had to check his data center for structural damage.
An earthquake Wednesday had shaken western Washington for nearly a minute at a magnitude of 6.8 and immediately taken out power and phone lines. Using power from backup generators, Curtright and his staff put their business-continuity plans into action, moving quickly to ensure that the state government's IT and telecommunications systems weren't interrupted.
Following a set of well-practiced procedures, Curtright and his staff next identified the need to interrupt normal nightly batch processing for all areas of the state government in order to keep the state police's computer-aided dispatch running. "If we'd continued to do the batch processing as normal, we would have run out of tape and the system would have gone down, taking down the state patrol's main line of communication with it," Curtright says. With all of the damage to the area around Olympia--crumbled building facades, sinkholes, and unsafe structures--an ineffective state patrol would have made things worse.
The Department of Information Services was one of five of SunGard customers to put the company on alert after the quake hit. One of SunGard's primary competitors in the business-continuity services space,IBM (NYSE: IBM) Global Services, says it was in contact with nearly 20 clients in the Seattle area. While few of these clients reported substantial damage to their IT facilities, IBM classified one of its customers in "yellow mode" and moved that company's operations to an IBM local access suite in Seattle where it could access backup AS/400 systems run by IBM in Boulder, Colo.
Although Seattle weathered the earthquake well, the event was the latest visible testament to the need for business-continuity preparedness. "We live in a dangerous world, and every time something happens (whether it's a natural disaster or a rampant virus), there tends to be a blip where people focus on business-continuity plans, then it's back to business as usual," Meta Group analyst Fred Joy says.
As Todd Gordon, general manager of IBM Global Services' business-continuity and recovery services, sees it, companies have two choices: They can do little to prepare for disruptions and use the money they would have spent on a business-continuity plan for other projects, or they can see business continuity as an investment. Gordon says the lack of qualified business-continuity specialists makes it difficult and expensive for companies to react to an emergency. As a result, he suggests that all companies analyze the effect downtime can have on their businesses and invest even half that amount to write business-continuity procedures, train employees, and designate backup sites.
The tendency to view business-continuity services as a necessary evil belies the importance of such precautions in an increasingly networked world. "People don't like to buy insurance, and they certainly don't like to contemplate what needs to happen for them to collect," Joy says. "But businesses now more than ever rely on a complex network of digital and human interaction that's pretty fragile."
When the state of Washington put its business-continuity plan in place nearly a decade ago, some agencies opposed the expenditure. But Curtright says the PCs damaged by falling ceiling tiles and the boxes of computer tapes spilled across the data center's floor as a result of this week's quake will be enough to silence those naysayers.
