CTO Forum: Business continuity at forefront in wake of Sept. 11

SAN FRANCISCO -- Business continuity and disaster recovery, always critical issues for IT, have been highlighted even further in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a panel of CTOs acknowledged during a session here at CTO Forum on Wednesday.

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Executives from organizations such as the U.S. Defense Department, iPlanet, and Plural, an IT services firm located near the World Trade Center in New York, pondered the best strategies for maintaining access to data under adverse conditions.

At Plural, officials were holding a staff meeting when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, said Plural CTO Andre Hill. "It literally shook our building," Hill said.

Employees left the building and were not back for six weeks and many consultants did not have their laptops, Hill said. "There was a serious business continuity problem," Hill said.

But the company kept business running by separating workloads onto systems in Washington and Chicago. Enterprises need a separate level of planning for contingency situations, Hill stressed.

At the Pentagon, also targeted in the attack, operations were maintained by utilizing the basement, said Dawn Meyerricks, CTO at the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency in Washington.

Strategywise, iPlanet works with customers to make systems resilient in the event of a disaster, said iPlanet CTO Hal Stern. Even non-disaster situations can cause problems with system uptime, such as what CNN had during the 2000 presidential elections, Stern said.

"In CNN, politics created a disaster for them in terms of load and maintenance," Stern said. Enterprises need to look at system redundancies, he said.

System upkeep, according to Alan Harbiter, CTO of PEC Solutions, is "a matter of designing redundancy into the systems."

Even with redundant systems, a failure can cause the backup system to then fail, Harbiter said. "When one fails, it brings the other down immediately," he said. The panel noted that this, oddly enough, is true redundancy, with even failures being replicated among systems.

Prabakar Sundarrajan, CTO of Netscaler, stressed that security is critical to business continuity and recommended screening out certain factors that can cause disruptions, such as unexpected system loads.