RE: Disaster Recovery

Hi, Kendall:

I think a reasonable disaster recovery plan will take into account the 
likelihood that the organization could survive, should something happen 
that would necessitate hot sites or offsite storage at the recommended 
distance. For a Fortune 10 company, or an international bank, 500 miles 
might even be inadequate. A Katrina-level event can disrupt everything for 
hundreds of miles around. A 100-yard meteor, or a terrorist nuke, could 
screw things up for much of a continent, yet leave the world as a whole 
able to function.

For a family owned company with about 400 employees and only one 
manufacturing site, 250 miles would probably be excessive. The amount of 
effort it would take to rebuild the organization might exceed the total 
effort required by all of its customers to create alternative supply chain 
partners, even starting from scratch.

It is probably better to lean toward caution, but each organization will 
have its own "sweet spot" where risk begins to be unambiguously outweighed 
by cost. Plan for that.

Darrell

Darrell A. Martin  -  754-2187
Manager, Computer Operations
dmartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

I recently read a document that had the following recommendations 
for either backup sites or offsite storage location:

- US Securities and Exchange Commission: 250 miles
- US Homeland Security: 500 miles

These are much farther than anything we recommended in the past.

Kendall Kinnear

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