Many of us, as long time technology leaders, have our hurricane preparedness and tabletop exercises down to a science. We know they work. We have tested them through events like Hurricanes Harvey, Tropical Storm Imelda and many more. We believe, rightly so, that we are seasoned professionals. This year is different. We need to prepare for the potential of two major crises at once, a hurricane and COVID-19. What needs to be done?
Confirm what is needed for operations from home - So many people are working from home now. For critical team members, do you need to provide UPSes to keep their router and laptop working? Maybe even generators? These are serious considerations for your executives and the people who have the highest impact on revenue.
Confirm suppliers and equipment availability - Some of our trusted, long time suppliers of emergency replacement equipment and services have either gone out of business or will not be able to supply replacement equipment or services quickly. They are short-staffed and when everyone starts calling, unless you have a written agreement, you will just be another customer in line.
Stock emergency spares now - Many times we stock only a small quantity of emergency spares and rely on vendors to provide larger quantities if needed. Given the supply chain situation, we need to work with our businesses to determine the real need and consider stocking a few more of the critical emergency technology parts than normal.
Go active-active on all those critical links - One of the projects many of us have on the “to-do list” is to move our remote locations to active-active connections and diversify providers. Even our less critical servers do not always have diverse paths and network connections. Develop the project plan quickly and move forward. When systems start to fail, we want to have eliminated as many single-points of failure as possible.
Test the plan for real - Many of us participate in table top exercises each year. This is good. Even better and needed this year is to test the plans for real. When was your last restore from backup? When did you last switch from the primary to the secondary server? When did you force the load-balancer to break and see if the redundancy worked? We cannot test for every situation but we can test for the top 3-5 probable situations.
This year will be different. People may not be as readily available. Spend a couple of hours together brainstorming, make your plan and work your plan. Simply starting with the acknowledgement that this hurricane season will be different will help your technical team members prepare.
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