Oct 22, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
Over the past three columns we have been looking at recovering from a personal data disaster. You can lose access to the data on your PCs and external hard drives in a variety of ways. Fire, flood, hurricane, tornado, or mudslides are only a few of the hazards that we might face. In my case it was a fire, and it was an eye opening experience. I learned that I had failed to plan adequately for the very things I had been writing about and consulting on in the corporate environment.
I have tried to share the major considerations for folks who work from home offices, as I do, but this time I want to turn back to where I am most comfortable: the enterprise. As I have been working through my own recovery issues I have been talking to colleagues who work in business recovery services and coming to learn that many of the mistakes I made in my home planning are made by large enterprises, too.
Think about the area that you work in. Regardless of your level of responsibility, do you know what the plan is for recovering the data that you work with every day if there is a disaster? Do you know where it is backed up or how to arrange to get it restored?
If you work in the print and mail side of your operation, do you know if all of your print resources are up-to-date in your offsite facility? Are you sure that there is a sufficient quantity of the right kind of paper to meet your obligations, like check printing, if you face a disaster?
Have you looked carefully at all of the pieces that go into the creation of your mission critical jobs to determine if they have been adequately considered in the business recovery plan?
One of the reasons that this is a critical question is that in many enterprises the IT department builds the business recovery plan. They may ask for input, but they rarely have a clear understanding of the needs and issues faced in producing HVCO jobs.
Beyond the considerations like the availability of paper and adequacy of the resource files, there is also the question of what equipment you intend to use in your recovery effort. I mentioned in previous columns in this arc that when you go to restore files from back up tapes and disks you may find that they are no longer compatible with the operating systems you use. In the corporate environment you can encounter similar difficulties, especially if you do not plan regular back up tests.
For example, your Xerox printers have operating systems on them. It is possible for a specific job to require a specific level of patch to run. If your recovery center machine is not in sync with your home environment you may find that resources fail and files fail. If your AFP PSF libraries are not completely in sync you may find that jobs in your recovery environment are missing signatures, print out of the page margins, or encounter other print quality problems.
None of these problems is trivial, and that is working on the assumption that your data files will move to the recovery environment without problems. We'll continue to explore the challenges of disaster recovery in an HVCO environment next time. If this is valuable, drop us a line at
pm@outputlinks.com!