Dayton IT Consulting

I’m not talking about a Journey song today.  This week Cincinnati and Dayton are getting a chance to test out their business continuity plans.  BC is more than an IT strategy or a disaster recovery plan.  Its how you keep in business when mother nature throws a curve at you.  Part of our IT strategy solutions includes an IT wellness check.  One of the items we cover as part of the IT wellness check is BC (Business Continuity).  So how are you doing?

Since I asked, you may be wondering, how we faired STAR BASE?  I would give us an overall grade of a C.   Power is back on, our servers are up and running, we were able to do our normal day to day business.  There is just one problem.   Our T1 is down.  That means we didn’t have inbound phones and no inbound email or web.  

Email and phones are probably the biggest issue.  Cincinnati Bell says there is a box somewhere that needs power and until Duke gets power restored, we are going to be down.   Current customers have cell numbers to reach us with.  Potentially new customers are a problem.

We are going to look at some sort redundant internet connection, maybe wireless.   We are also going to look at more IP addresses at our remote office so we can direct traffic there.   We currently replicate there every hour. 

One of the hardest things to determine in business continuity planning is determining what is business critical vs what is business inconvenient.  The last time there was a wind storm of this magnitude was 108 years ago.  We were definitely not dependent on power then as much as we are now.  So the question is, do you plan for a hundred year event or not?

It all comes down to cost.  How much will it cost to have a disaster proof plan, if there is such a thing vs how much will it cost to do with out.  Each business will have to decide that for themselves.   I know that one company in Cincinnati that has 3 data centers within 20 miles of downtown.  They were thinking about consolidating data centers.  They may want to look at moving a data center to another state far, far away.