Annually, as the Atlantic hurricane season approaches many businesses have a nagging realization that they're in danger as a result of catastrophic "Black Swan " event. Black Swan events are a consistent supply of risk in states like Florida where many communities are at the mercy of disruption as a result of coastal storms. This risk is particularly acute for businesses that be determined by the storage of on-line data if you have a chance their critical data could become lost or corrupted. But the threat from Black Swan events isn't limited to Florida, nor is it limited to large scale disruptive events like hurricanes.The black swan theory or theory of black swan events describes a disruptive event that comes as a shock, includes a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the actual fact with the main benefit of hindsight. The word is based on a historical saying which presumed black swans did not exist, but the old saying was rewritten after black swans were discovered in the wild. Consider the following scenario...
"We tend to think about disasters with regards to the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or other mega events. Sometimes, however, less notable events occur that may have a catastrophic effect on a business. In February 1981, an electric fire in the basement of the State Office Building in Binghamton, New York, spread through the basement of the building setting fire to a transformer containing over a lot of gallons of toxin-laden oil. Originally thought to be PCBs, the toxins were soon determined to contain dioxin and dibenzofuran, two of the very dangerous chemicals ever created. The fire was smoky and quickly filled the 18-story building with smoke. While the transformer burned, the soot entered the buildings ventilation shafts and quickly spread toxic soot through the building. The building was so badly contaminated so it took 13 years and over $47 million to wash before the building could possibly be reentered or used. Because of the nature of the fire, the building and its contents, including all paper records, computers, and personal ramifications of the people who worked there, were not recoverable. This sort of event would be irrecoverable for all businesses." - Operations Due Diligence, Published by McGraw Hill
What affect would a catastrophic hurricane that affected a whole region or perhaps a localized disruptive event just like a fire have on the operation of your organization? Could you survive that type of interruption or loss? While the dependence on on-line data has grown in just about any form of business, so has the danger that loss of the data could disrupt the operation of the business enterprise and even bring about its complete failure. In reaction to these threats, there's been an evolution in the approaches used to mitigate these risks as the amount of on-line data has continued to grow. Originally, the idea of Disaster Recovery (DR) emerged as a mitigation strategy that dedicated to the recovery of critical data following a disruptive event giving the business enterprise the ability to restore disrupted IT operations. https://kidedab311.wixsite.com/cambodiabusiness/post/prince-group-donate-for-covid-19-efforts-in-cambodia
Disaster Recovery (DR) involves some policies and procedures that enable the restoration of critical business data and allows the IT infrastructure to be restored to a prior state. DR was originally regarded as the domain of the IT department who received responsibility for mitigating the risk. To minimize the danger, system backups were scheduled frequently and aggressive DR plans that included server cold start procedures and data backups were implemented.
The goal was to displace the infrastructure to the last point where the data have been copied (at the full time, typically on tape). The acceptable DR practices at the time allowed the IT system to be rebooted once the facility power was finally restored... Unless it absolutely was in a flood zone or the off-site backup storage facility had been impacted. In any case, the operation of the facility might be disrupted for some time period and the information restoration was also potentially in danger depending on where backups were stored.