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For Campus IT: Early Lessons From Katrina
9/7/2005
Planning For The Next Katrina May Not Be As Useful As Developing IT Flexibility
Disaster planning will undoubtedly be a hot topic for campus IT, following Katrina. What lessons can be learned? What can be done differently? Is it possible to be prepared for every contingency?
Some lessons may be fairly obvious. Coming up with better plans and being able to execute them may take more time. We hope our readers will share experiences and ideas on our “Disaster Planning and Recovery” online forum. To add your views and insights, click here. To begin, here are a few preliminary thoughts about what we’ve learned from Katrina so far.
Electricity.
One of the first lessons from Katrina is that if you don’t have electrical power, you don’t have IT. At least, not for very long. A disaster of this magnitude can quickly erase all the technological progress of the past century. When even back-up generators failed, nurses at New Orleans hospitals were left trying to operate ventilators by hand to keep patients alive.Without electricity, every gadget from iPod to super computer becomes a boat anchor. The portable hardware we enjoy, our laptops, cell phones and PDAs, are relatively short lived. When you go a week or more without access to a working electrical outlet, where are you going to recharge? Generators are good backups, but most are not designed to run underwater, and sooner or later fuel stockpiles run out. Even gadgets that run on common AA and AAA batteries will eventually exhaust most supplies, unless you stock as many alkaline batters as a WalMart warehouse.
It’s easy to imagine a campus IT department cut off from electricity by disaster where the only device still working is a solar-powered calculator. All this may be an argument for solar energy that g'es beyond the obvious environmental benefits. After all, the sun will come up tomorrow, even after a hurricane. Studying alternative energy sources may not be just an academic exercise in Big Science.
Flexibility.
Brian Voss, who left Indiana University this past year to take the position of CIO at Louisiana State University, found one of his biggest new job challenges was coping with Katrina. Flexibility quickly became his motto. He told Campus Technology (see “Universities Hit by Katrina Tap Technologies To Stay Afloat”) that since the hurricane struck he has suspended normal IT activity and is concentrating on “quick-and dirty applications” to do needful things such as helping parents locate their LSU students.The flexibility of humans and their brains is said to be the key to our Darwinian
survival, at least in the geological short term since
we forced the Neanderthals into extinction. The ability of a campus IT department
to isolate and assess the problems in a disaster and come up with solutions
on the fly may be the best disaster plan. :::::: NETWORK SECURITY :::::: CAMPUS SECURITY NEWS :::::: FOCUS :: Lyon's 1:1 Laptop Program Aims To 'Level the Playing Field' for Students :::::: IT NEWS :::::: EXECUTIVE VIEW :::::: WORTH NOTING :::::: VIEWPOINT :::::: NEWS and PRODUCT UPDATES :::::: NEWS :::::: CASE STUDY :: Job Scheduling Software Smooths Data Transfers at IUF :::::: IT NEWS
In the past week, this has been the experience of Sascha Meinrath of the Champaign-Urbana
Community Wireless Network. Explaining the group’s efforts to restore
wireless in areas impacted by Katrina, Meinrath told
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