I have come to realize that having Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel broadcasting from your hometown is not necessarily a good thing.  If you live in Florida and it’s during hurricane season, it’s a really bad thing.  I live in Tallahassee, Florida and we spent last weekend with Tropical Storm Faye.  Half of Tallahassee is under water and the other half is focused only on the wet half.  No one however seems to be talking about disaster recovery.  It seems to me that seeing many of your neighbors underwater and looking at pictures of kayaks floating down streets near your datacenter would prompt visions of hot sites and business continuity……..

It never fails to amaze me how little Government puts resources into disaster recovery.  I don’t mean the front line technologists.  I mean the policy and decision makers.  Let’s face it; the public sector has to run lean.  Budget cuts are the flavor of the year.  Yet no one ever acknowledges how critical it is to have a business continuity plan.   When I was CIO of Florida we constantly found agencies whose idea of disaster recovery was to put tapes in a non climate controlled mini warehouse, which happened to be located in a flood zone.  Yes, a flood zone, in the State that seems to breed hurricanes.  The few agencies that had an actual hot site were rarely budgeted for actually testing it.  These are agencies that are responsible for peoples’ lives.  It seems to me someone would wake up and smell the disaster.

If you have any disaster recovery horror stories waiting to happen or that have already happened, let me know.  Everyone loves a good horror story, even Jim Cantore.