The Human Aspect of Disaster Recovery

By Walt Thomasson

Many organizations tend to get caught up in “checking the blocks” of audits, losing sight of the human aspect of a business recovery. However, the best recovery plan on paper may be severely strained – or not work at all – if the personnel side is not adequately provided for.

Traditionally, disaster recovery planning is often housed under the IT department, and is primarily focused on data recovery and communications restoration. This often leads to the misconception that if a company is prepared for IT failures, it is prepared to handle business recovery. However, senior leadership must take a hard look at their organization’s disaster recovery plan and verify it accounts for more than just bringing up applications and servers.

Senior leadership must evaluate the recovery plan to ensure it is not a “cookie cutter” solution . How a business reacts to an extended power outage will not be the same as its reaction to a natural disaster; in addition, how the accounting department is recovered will probably not be in the same manner or time frame as the customer service department. It is important to be sure the provider does not attempt to pass off one solution for all events, for all departments. Look for a disaster recovery provider capable of providing several solutions, with the best one to be decided upon after a complete damage assessment by leadership has been conducted.

If an organization takes care of its employees first, the employees will take care of the company. Each business must decide on a course of action prior to a disaster. It is up to each company to determine what support, if any, it will provide family members of employees. On one hand, there are instances of fully functional alternate work sites sitting empty because the employees were caring for their families. On the other hand, there are instances where employees showed up to alternate work sites with family – including aunts, uncles, in-laws, cats and dogs.

Almost every company has used the line “Our people are our greatest asset.” However, the welfare and safety of an employee’s family will be an employee’s primary concern, and only after those fears are allayed will a company be able to utilize its greatest assets in a disaster.

Senior leadership sets the tone for recovery exercises. From time to time, companies should conduct comprehensive recovery exercises to identify any areas of improvement as well as any unforeseen variables. Training for the worst-case scenario helps identify potential hurdles in the less impacting disasters. These exercises are an excellent tool in identifying areas of improvement within the company, within the recovery provider and within local infrastructures – phone companies, for example.

One of the essential aspects of the comprehensive exercise is: in order for the line workers to take the exercise seriously, the senior leadership must take it seriously. In a situation where the company is in jeopardy, the senior leaders would be on the ground immediately, and leadership needs to bring that mentality to the test. If the leadership takes the testing as an opportunity to skip out for a few holes of golf, it sends the message to the employees that the test is nothing more than an elaborate “fire drill.”

Finally, in a tabletop exercise, the senior leadership may learn about their own resiliency in a crisis and how they react to stress. Knowing how leadership and other key individuals could react under the immense pressure associated with a business recovery is very important information to have prior to an actual business interruption. There are some experts who recommend moving disaster recovery planning out of IT completely and housing it under HR. While the benefits of a such a move have yet to be weighed, one thing is certain: senior leaders need to ensure the disaster recovery planning of their organization is not being conducted in a vacuum that does not account for the company’s greatest assets.