OVERVIEW

The nature and severity of a disaster, be it a terrorist attack, earthquake, fire, flood, an accident at a chemicals plant, or some city-wide damage caused by rioting Enron stockholders, is what determines how long your business will be disrupted. Location-specific businesses are at a disadvantage, for even a well-secured building equipped with the latest fault tolerant technology and top-notch disaster recovery and security policies will ultimately succumb (or the roads, bridges and public transportation leading to them will collapse) if a "disaster" actually lives up to its dictionary definition: "An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe. A grave misfortune."

Hence: A business that "can't get out of harm's way" is a business that is a sitting duck.

We've seen that the primary means of minimizing the impact of disaster on a business is to make it as "distributed" as possible. We've looked at how data and applications can be distributed, cleverly placed on networks and "remote vaulted" to distant, secure buildings either owned by your company or supplied by a hosted backup service.

But if you can distribute data and computing power to make it safe from disasters of the natural or man-made variety, what about your employees? Can't you distribute them too? Can't you extend your business environment, the applications and the data, to wherever they are, so that if disaster wipes out your headquarters the remaining network can shoulder the burden as best it can until some temporary, larger telework centers are brought on...