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For Campus IT: Early Lessons From Katrina
9/7/2005
Wired News: “We have a breakdown in many of the things that people rely on to deploy these systems, and then we have people whose expertise is in rubber-banding and bubble-gum-sticking and pulling together things with whatever's at hand. That's very much what we need right now--people with that level of improvisation and expertise."Disasters on the scale of Katrina do not occur frequently enough for past experience to be much of a guide or help. This is especially true with events like the so-called Hundred Year Storm. Experience may be the best teacher but human experience rarely spans 100 years. The last hurricane and flood to destroy a US city was the one that hit Galveston, TX in 1900. While that storm, which killed 8,000 people, has been well documented in books and film, it is beyond the living memory of all but a few centenarians. It is possible that today’s kindergarteners will be lucky enough to mark their 100th birthdays without ever seeing another hurricane and flood on the devastating scale of Katrina.
Also, rigidly detailed disaster plans based on past experience are not always helpful because disasters do not follow neatly scripted scenarios. Every disaster, human or man-made, is a unique historic event. Armies historically come to grief because their generals hatched plans to fight the last war and didn’t anticipate the tactics of the new one. The infantry maneuvers of the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, were of little use against the machine guns of World War I. To spend a great deal of time planning for the next Katrina might be an interesting intellectual exercise but it may not be as useful as simply building flexibility into an IT organization and where possible into the hardware and software, as well.
Off-site Back-up
As it happens, most disasters, with the possible exception of the end of the world, are local. An earthquake could potentially level San Francisco again, but computer rooms as near as Sacramento or Los Angeles might be completely unaffected. With Katrina, Houston has proved a safe haven even though devastated New Orleans is only 500 miles away.While it may not make sense to run a campus IT operation from Bangalore, India, it may be prudent to investigate off-site data storage and even setting up back-up Websites at off-site locations. This would support uninterrupted access to critical Web applications, including those that help administrators, parents and students locate one another. It may not be wise to have all campus IT hardware and software in one geographic location.
Add Your Thoughts
These are only a few thoughts on what we are learning from this disaster. Planning based on Katrina will be an ongoing project for Campus IT. Please share your ideas and experiences, including your experience with Katrina, on our “Disaster Planning and Recovery” online forum. To add your thoughts and insights, click here.
Rich Seeley is Web Editor for Campus Technology.
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