Masters of natural disasters: IT survivors share DR tips and tricks

Natural and manmade disasters are facts of life. Smart IT managers prepare for the worst before trouble hits, so that the businesses and government institutions that rely on IT can resume normal operations as soon as possible.

So what are the nitty-gritty details of anticipating, managing and recovering from disaster? Network World spoke to IT experts and managers who have survived disasters to find out.

1. Identify what needs protecting To successfully prepare for disaster, an IT manager first has to know what elements must be kept out of harm’s way. Data is a no-brainer: Everything that matters should be replicated in a safe second location, either off-premises or in the cloud ­ or both, for redundancy’s sake.

[ALSO: Hurricane Katrina disaster recovery lessons still popping up]

But data is just the beginning: Applications and the facilities to run them also need to be taken into account.

License keys also matter, says Keith Oufnac. He is vice president of Information Technology with Eustis Insurance and Benefits, an insurance agency in New Orleans.

“When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, we had our license keys safely burned to CDs, which I had packed in my SUV along with backup drives and spare laptops. Today, I simply keep them backed up in my Yahoo email account and on Microsoft SkyDrive. It matters: In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we didn’t have any problem reloading applications, because the license keys were all available.”

Protection also includes whatever items an IT manager needs to survive personally when disaster strikes. “My wife and I had bags of clothes, toiletries and other items ready at the door in the buildup to Katrina,” Oufnac says. “So when things got serious, we didn’t have to waste time scrambling around. We were ready to go.”

While his wife camped out at an Atlanta hotel, Oufnac moved into a four-bedroom house out of the affected area, along with “my parents, grandparents, sister and her husband (two kids 10 and 8), my brother and his girlfriend, three dogs and a partridge and a pear tree,” he says.