Venyu Blog

With Hurricane Earl barreling down on the mid-Atlantic and New England coasts, a reminder that Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) for businesses of all sizes is the order of the day.

As presented in detail in this ComputerWorld article this morning (September 2), Hurricane Earl will test the preparedness of even the most robust and ready IT Data Centers.  Among the tips presented by the authors:

• Update contact lists with phone numbers and e-mail addresses of vendors, key workers  and executives;
• Confirm which are your critical applications and establish the recovery point objectives for each;
• Notify key employees of their assignments in case a primary location goes offline due to the storm;
• Take snapshots of server configurations, and ensure that bare metal restores can be performed at alternate disaster recovery sites;
• Notify critical business units by e-mail what steps have been taken to ensure that their processes will remain up in case of an outage in primary facilities; and
• Consider having manual procedures in place to continue business functions in case of an extended data center disruption.

In addition, IT managers should make sure that diesel generators are topped off with fuel; fill reserve fuel tanks; cross-map key business processes to ensure that managers know the tasks of each facility; and let less critical business units know that their applications or systems may not be available for a time.

You can also find Venyu-specific information on disaster recovery here.  And Venyu contact information here.

Here’s to your business riding out the storm, with our sincerest hope that it passes by, leaving you and your business unscathed and your IT operations uninterrupted.