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How Ready Is Ready?

9/26/2006

By Mikael Blaisdell

Katrina was a wake-up call for more than the Gulf Coast schools: Our inquiring columnist looks at three disaster-aware institutions, and checks out their websites to see how far they’ve come.

HARD TO BELIEVE it is little more than a year ago that the US higher education community faced a rude awakening in the form of Hurricane Katrina. As levees ruptured, winds raged, and flood levels rose, college and university CIOs and administrators discovered how quickly a campus can lose all access to telephone and cell phone communication, computers, and data. In such a disaster, students and faculty may be scattered locally or regionally with no way of contacting one another, communicating their status, or knowing if the campus is safe or imperiled. E-mail and websites may be down, and phones may be inoperable. Communication among administration, faculty, students, and their families can be lost in a heartbeat, just when the need for a source of reliable information is greatest. And administrative computing resources can come to an abrupt halt, meaning no expediting of services, no payrolls, bills paid, or accounts received. Katrina proved it could happen. Now, a year later, how are schools preparing for the possibility of other catastrophic events?

ONE YEAR LATER, a quick glance at the websites
of schools in the path of potential natural disaster
shows just how far they have—or haven’t—come
in the disaster-preparedness scheme of things.

The first step in disaster planning is, of course, to acknowledge the possibility of a disaster. New Orleans will always be vulnerable to hurricanes, so Xavier University (LA) must prepare to be hit again. Yet, on the other side of the country in California, where earthquakes are a likely occurrence (and recent press coverage points to acknowledgement that California may be unprepared for an anticipated, sizable event), what have the University of Southern California and the University of California-Berkeley done to prepare for potential disaster?

Strategic Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

When IT is under water, how well can anything else operate? In the thr'es of Katrina, Xavier University administrators and technologists were faced with the painful realization that the university’s main computing facility was vulnerable, and that it could be put out of action for an extended period of time. While other schools volunteered space on their servers for email and other daily functions, taking advantage of such assistance for anything more than that would mean that Xavier would temporarily hand over control of sensitive (donor list, etc.) and financial data to a host institution— functions that simply could not be hosted on loaner systems. Xavier now will have a mirrored site in another region of the country that can immediately be used to provide access to all of the necessary systems. The provisioning of that alternate site brought up another critical point for Xavier CIO Cathy Lewis.

“A lot of people will start off thinking that they have to duplicate everything,” she notes, “but that’s not what they should be doing. You have to ask yourself: What’s critical? What’s really necessary in order to keep on operating?” That’s the kind of analysis that is necessary to proceed with business continuity planning in order to a) keep focus clear, b) keep emergency systems nimble and, importantly, c) actually be able to secure the funds for the project without dangerous delays and without relegating other IT needs (such as learning technologies) to the back burner.

Where should you begin searching for assistance with offsite redundant systems capability? On the data side, companies such as SunGard Higher Education and IBM can offer solutions for offsite mirrored servers and functionality. Sprint has an emergency response team that can bring in mobile broadcast towers to restore mobile phone networks, and Verizon offers Business Resilience consulting and services to help mitigate both critical voice and data outages across the campus enterprise. But look to academic partnering, as well: Other schools that have not been hit by a disaster may step forward to offer both short and longer-term assistance. Yet why leave this to chance? Plan ahead! The availability of such potential resources d'es not mean that no planning is necessary in order to use them effectively.