IT Lessons from Superstorm Sandy

As cleanup continues on the East Coast in the wake of last week’s hurricane, several commentators say the Sandy’s devastation should serve as a wake-up call for IT managers. In particular, the storm drives home the importance of backups and disaster recovery planning.

Byte’s Boonsri Dickinson wrote, “Websites such as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and Gawker were down temporarily after Sandy’s wake, when water flooded their data centers, all of which are located in lower Manhattan. This is a reminder to Internet-based businesses to never have all your data in one location — or in two locations that could be affected by the same natural disaster.”

InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia noted,”A disaster like Hurricane Sandy is exactly why we have DR planning. This is exactly why we hedge our bets and pay attention to the details of our infrastructure — thus, when a Sandy happens, we don’t lose everything. Now that we’ve seen an event occur that’s nearly unprecedented in the area, perhaps those who have been busy discounting DR planning and expense may finally see the importance of those efforts. Sometimes it takes a lot to change a person’s mind.”

According to Wayne Rash from eWeek, “There are a lot of things that go into an effective business continuity plan that will keep you operational in the midst of a major natural disaster. But the most basic factor is a reliable electric power supply.”

And GigaOm’s David Linthicum opined, “While there were some outages, the major cloud providers held together pretty well, all things considered. Indeed, look beyond the pounding the storm gave the East Coast, and the upside is that these events can teach cloud computing providers how to stay alive when it really counts.”