Disaster Plans Get New Scrutiny After Blackout

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Disaster Plans Get New Scrutiny After Blackout
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

When Richard A. Grasso, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, said last year that the Big Board was considering a backup trading floor at a "nuclear distance" from New York City, it was treated as an ill-phrased gaffe. But after last week's power failure that blanketed an area stretching from the Northeast to the Midwest, companies are taking a harder look at whether their disaster recovery plans go far enough — literally.

"The geographic dispersion of this event really causes some rethinking for companies," said Jim Simmons, the chief executive of Sungard Availability Services, a company in Wayne, Pa. that runs disaster recovery centers for about 10,000 clients in North America and Europe.

Many companies that tried to manage their own disaster recovery plans, he said, found on Aug. 14 that the backup site they had created was still within the blackout area. He said customers told him: "Gee, I never thought it would be out on Long Island and out in New Jersey."

But even having backup centers hundreds of miles away might not have helped, he said, since the blackout zone extended into the Midwest and Canada. "The education coming out of this disaster is you can't predict a disaster," he said. Companies like his ensure that the data is there and desks are there for clients who pay anything from a few hundred dollars a month to a million dollars a month. "For some companies," he said, "minutes of downtime can cost millions of dollars."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/technology/19BACK.html