Pandemic planning, and working from home.

Disaster recovery planning is being challenged by the possibility of avian bird flu or other outbreak that would leave workers stuck at home for weeks at a time. The worst case scenario is that avian bird flu mutates into a fast spreading communicable disease. The challenge for public safety, county and city services is this. How do you still provide services when your staff can not leave home or is simply afraid to enter into the normal workplace?

City jobs that require physical labor will be severely impacted as workers call in sick. But the computer operations that many people do all day long can be done from home. Remote computing can assist in some situations. The challenge is how to make it work securely and easily from users homes. Remote computing can help when they are either afraid to come to work or have symptoms of the disease themselves. Remote computing, or telecommuting, has been around for years and is used by many corporations. How can such technology be used?

For a brief example of how remote computing would help an organization, we will start with a critical city service, paying the bills! Verifying pay records, verifying overtime and assimilating all the businesses and services who need to get paid is a huge job. The final product after the batch runs is to create the paychecks for distribution. The city users who do this at their computer would need to be able to do this from their home computer in a way that is secure and gives the users access to the same resources they have in the office workplace. What are the challenges to doing this? The first is to find out what are the most important tasks that keep the city running, like check writing. Parcel out the tasks into high and low priority, in order of how often and the amount of people it takes to do the task.

One the tasks are broken into priority and number of users, those applications that people use can be put on remote access servers in such a way that most home based users could run the application from their home pc. That means minimal amount of software installed on the users home computer, and a secure connection to the city resources either via internet, dial-up or radio. This would allow the users to run these applications from the computers at home without endangering themselves or others.

The technology exists to solve the problems discussed here, the question is how much money are governments willing to spend? Are they ready to spend money on building systems that are only used for emergencies? There has been more than one local government that recently stopped paying for offsite disaster recovery services, even in the light of Hurricane Katrina. Setting aside funds for disaster recovery systems is like setting aside money for anything that is not critical. The money is competing for many other hands and people are fighting for those funds.

Let’s go over some of the steps needed for pandemic planning, and disaster recovery.

• Ensure you incorporating lessons learned! Every past disaster has lessons that should be used in revised plans
• Incorporating human impacts into the recovery and planning process
• Prepare for the human nature aspect, to prepare staff for the psychological effects
• Educate and communicate with employees to increase their awareness
• Leveraging executive and management buy-ins
• Testing, and enhancing work from home procedures and options
• Merging private and public sector best practices to enhance emergency preparedness
• Enhancing communication techniques during disasters and measure the effects
• Building business unit, and departmental preparedness to cross train employees

Key to building a good disaster recovery system is to have a plan, take small steps with knowledge and commitment from stakeholders. Planning for disaster recovery takes a determined project planning effort. If you can’t make out a project plan, can’t write down the dependencies and dates when they need to be done, they you probably shouldn’t embark on DR until you can do the project management needed.

For project management, you don’t need an expert. There are people certified in project management. The PMI institute is one place to look for training and advice on how to train people to become project managers.

In closing, we state the obvious, that fighting for funding may be the biggest challenge in making a disaster recovery system come to exist. Operational expenses do exist when trying to duplicate any service, and like anything that is not used every day, it needs to be tested now and then. This all adds up to operational expense. The ability to recover your IT or communications systems from a disaster takes a large investment in time, training, vendor selection and PATIENCE!

The take away lesson from this:

Disaster recovery solution implementation has to come from the top, where the money is distributed and reallocated. Initial expenditures and operational costs must be taken into account and put in the budget for a system to work reliably year after year. Copyright 2006, R. Deluhery Op911.net Technology for public safety