10.1 Introduction

Jesse James rides into town to rob your bank. He walks in and blows up the safe. In the process the bank is destroyed. Your situation is now very bad: no money, no safe and no bank. Now what do you do?

You, the information technology (IT) manager, may face the same situation, in which the infrastructure is damaged beyond use. Now what do you do? One answer is to scramble and quickly try to repair the damage from the disaster, or try to find another site. Suppose your data center burns to the ground let's look at minimum steps needed to get the enterprise back on-line. Let's assume that you have a central data center and all servers and mission-critical applications are at this data center. Let's also assume that you have off-site backups. Following are the steps:

1. Assess the damage. Is there any thing left that can be reused? Probably not. If the fire and smoke did not do enough damage, then water from the fire trucks finished the job.

2. Notify internal and external business partners about the incident. Why? What if one of your partners were trying to send you an order. Your warehouse may not have been damaged and you could possibly take the order over the phone.

3. Obtain necessary office supplies and workspace.

4. Build and/or rebuild business processes via stand-alone systems and/or manual processes.

5. Obtain and install necessary hardware components, such as:

   • Wan, LAN, routers, servers, printers, and coffee machines

   • Software, backup tapes

   • Phone...