Engwar

The LBR-LBO CIO forum was an insightful event where it was discussed how local enterprises should think about disaster recovery and business continuity. The forum was moderated by Peter D’Almeda and there were some very interesting thoughts from the panellists as well as the audience.

Peter was interested in knowing why most corporations block services like skype and point out that those can be utilized in a disastrous situation. Also, it was noted that most organizations that employ a disaster recovery site never bother to actually test it. Resistance to such testing was said to be disruption to day-to-day activities. Regardless, it’s of utmost importance that you test your DR setup before an actual disaster strike.

One member of the audience asked how you could go about handling the human element when it comes to a disastrous situation as they’ve covered all the other scenarios and replicated all replicable resources. This, however was not well answered by the panel.

In order to justify the cost that’s involved having an online DR site, utilizing a percentage of the DR site to daily operations was suggested.

I wanted to ask if the companies represented by the panellists were considering cloud computing as a possible solution for their DR planning as it’s becoming much more cost effective compared to having a separate physical site with expensive hardware. Then again thought this would be a bit technical compared to the crowd there and direction the discussion was going, so didn’t ask that. Still, it would be an interesting thing to know, and if anyone is not considering going into cloud computing knowing that is even more interesting given the fact that biggest AWS users are banks and drug companies.