Internet Outlook with Richard Wiggins | 5

Have You Planned for an Internet Disaster?

When America Online had is famous day-long outage several months ago, many small businesses discovered for the first time that their corner of the Internet was critical to their continued functioning. It seems their AOL mailbox was their advertised contact point. If they couldn't sign on to AOL, they couldn't see new orders, customer queries, or discussions about work in progress. Their communication with customers was silenced.

Many of these same businesses -- those that didn't migrate to other service providers -- had to re-learn this lesson when AOL went to flat rate pricing. Phone lines were busy, and the 10 year old who wants to sneak into a naughty chat room competes equally with the home business customer who desperately needs to read email. This time, the desperate and the crafty realized they could buy an Internet access account from a local ISP, and connect to AOL over an Internet connection.

In both cases, people began to understand that something as basic as their Internet mailbox was a core part of their business life. Many decided to make backup plans or to move to services that they considered more reliable.

I once attended a session on disaster planning at a mainframe conference. A speaker from California noted that his company had a very complete disaster plan, under which their data center could resume operations from a site in Colorado within hours after a major earthquake. Data was periodically dumped to tape and shipped to the remote site. Telecommunications and staffing plans were devised down to the finest detail. "Earthquake drills" were used to measure effectiveness of the plan. "I know it sounds funny," he said, "but if you live in California and are responsible for an MIS shop, you are incompetent if you haven't planned for the certainty of an earthquake wiping out your entire operation. So then you ask yourself 'Why do I live in California?!'"

Similarly, have you thought through how critical the Internet is to your operations?

• What if your ISP goes down for a day? Can your customers reach you through an alternate path?
• What if a fire burns down the data center that houses your Web site? Do you have backup copies -- away from their premises -- of all your key HTML source, graphics files, and scripts?
• If your T1 line to the phone company goes down, do you have alternate plans for connecting your company to the Net?
• What about any back-end databases that you offer access to via the Net -- where are they backed up? How many hours would it take to install a new server, install the right release of your database software, and reload all your data?

Today, many organizations now rely on the Internet not just for publishing and customer communications, but to consume information. Yesterday I visited a high-tech firm on Route 128 in Boston. The company has over 100 professional engineers working on everything from water-jet cutting devices to non-lethal military weapons. Those engineers rely on desktop Internet connections to find out about competitive products, competing companies, and what suppliers can deliver to them. They may not realize how important the Net has become in finding the information they need to do business every day.

So every individual, company, government agency, university -- and community college -- would do well to ask themselves how vital the Internet is to their activities, and what steps they've taken to restore Internet service after a disaster.

Of course, it's only after a disaster that most of us undertake disaster planning. Did you ever lose a hard disk at a critical time, and at that point resolve that you'd implement daily change backups and weekly full backups? Did you follow through and do it? I didn't buy a UPS when I first realized the need. Now I'm looking through catalogs and resolving to follow through.

Think about it. What's your Internet half-life?