Cathy Taylor is the IT operations supervisor at QS/1 Data Systems, which provides products and services to health care providers. Taylor offered some lessons learned based on her own experience with a natural disaster, which prompted her IT department to develop a disaster recovery (DR) plan.

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What happened during the disaster; did you have plans in place?
In 2003, when Hurricane Isabel hit Richmond, Va., we didn’t have a disaster recovery plan in place. The BellSouth/AT&T central office there was completely flooded, so we lost all communication to our Richmond office. The hurricane made us realize the need to develop a plan. We only lost communication with the one office, and the office itself was not damaged. We also learned what problems were caused by losing communication to that office.

How should businesses ensure that their DR plans are up to date?
Making sure Express Metrix [Software Manager] is installed on every workstation and server is a must. We now make sure we have current backups of all key servers, along with off-site backups. We poll Express Metrix nightly, and all the information about the key servers is recorded in a Lotus Domino database. The information we get from Express Metrix includes the domain joined to, the IP address, manufacturer, model, serial number, number of processors, processor speed, memory, operating system, network adapter information, disk drive information and software installed. This information is replicated to two off-site locations. With this information, we could quickly replace any equipment we needed to.

A lot of companies have chosen to outsource the entire DR process. Have you considered this option?
No, this is not something we have considered or looked into. The argument against it would be cost and the lack of knowledge that an outside source would have of our business. The argument in favor of outsourcing would be that it takes the burden off employees to keep up with and make sure the plan is in place.