Is your technology pandemic-ready?

This article discusses the human side of technology and the potential challenges that may arise during a pandemic and the absence of ICT staff and key knowledge holders. It identifies some of the most commonly anticipated issues an organization is likely to face and makes some suggestions to help address them.

With many articles on pandemic planning focusing on the welfare of staff and the drive to keep critical business processes operational it is easy to forget the human requirements of the critical ICT services. This article seeks to redress the balance.

By Carl Bradbury MBCI, MBCS.

Given the current outbreak of pandemic (H1N1) flu, the vast majority of organizations are preparing specific flu related contingency plans and arrangements so they can manage the potential large scale absence of staff and still perform their critical business processes. Absenteeism may be due to a variety of reasons – such as the corporate policy of ‘stay away’, a significantly reduced public transport system making travel to and from work difficult, illness or a need to care for children or other sick dependents.

Ok, so your organization has remote working capability using virtual private networks, web-based interfaces or another method of remote connectivity. What issues have arisen when the remote access capability is oversubscribed in your company?

Experience tells us that there is little or no planning when it comes to the most productive utilization of the limited remote access capability. It’s basically a ‘free for all’ with staff vying for connectivity. This is inconvenient for short periods of disruption but may have serious repercussions if the large scale displacement of staff extends to longer periods especially if remote working is a potential solution for your organization.

What do you do to cope? Well you have two choices, increase the capacity of the organization’s remote access solution or ensure the business continuity plans clearly identify those who can have access, when they can have it and how long for.

But what about the actual technology itself or more specifically the operation and support of the technology by humans?

How hands on is your information and communications technology (ICT) operation?

Do staff need access to the ICT facility to perform their normal duties?

What would be the impact to the ICT operation if staff could not access the facility or were unable to provide support through illness?

Many of you might say that the ICT service can be operated remotely- this may be true (subject to the remote access having the capacity) - but have you considered the housekeeping processes such as backups?

* Do the backup processes require tapes to be manually changed each day?
* Does the disaster recovery strategy rely on tapes being removed from the primary ICT facility to secure offsite storage?
* What will happen to the backup processing if tapes can’t be replaced?
* What would the impact be if the disaster recovery backups remained on-site?

None of the above is insurmountable and can be mitigated against with the correct planning and preparation. There might be compromise decisions to be made, for example local backups could be written to a disk rather than tape or the same tapes could be reused each day although this may reduce the number of active generations. Disaster recovery backups could be written directly to a remote location or just left in place which will compromise the disaster recovery capability of the organization.

All of these are valid options; some will be feasible whilst others will not. The key is to understand the impact for your business and have the appropriate strategy in place to best suit the business needs. It might be necessary in extreme circumstances to make fundamental changes to the operating model and make it less ‘hands on’ for a defined period of time whilst the risk of staff absenteeism is high. In our experience, the levels of human intervention and support required to keep the ICT services running smoothly is often underestimated especially the ‘out of hours’ housekeeping tasks. Has the pandemic plan considered the people elements of the ICT service?

Detailed procedures (and training) may enable non-ICT staff to perform some of the tasks if required. However, would it be acceptable to grant non-ICT staff systems administration authority? This is where it is important to identify any vulnerable skill sets that are held by one or very few ICT staff.

Also to be considered is the impact of an ICT component failure, such as server, storage or network and the fact there may be no engineers available to resolve the problem? How resilient is the ICT service to component failure? Are there any single points of failure in the core infrastructure and end to end ICT service delivery?

It is advisable to examine your ICT infrastructure and identify any single points of failure and implement a greater degree of resilience where necessary.

Conclusion
We are seeing a lot of work going into the managing of core business staff during a possible pandemic but there is a vulnerable area that requires equal consideration. Having staff safely sitting at home ready to remotely log on is no use if a key ICT knowledge holder goes down with flu and no-one knows how to perform a critical process they always did on their own.

It is not a large task and thought must be given to how the organization can continue performing key activities that are done by specialist ICT staff that may not be available during a pandemic.

About the author: Carl Bradbury MBCI, MBCS is Senior ICT Continuity Consultant at Steelhenge, a niche consultancy specialising in business continuity management and crisis management. Carl has many years experience as an ICT and voice continuity practitioner and was one of the lead authors of the British Standard for ICT Continuity Management BS25777-1:2008 published in December 2008. Contact him at cb@steelhenge.co.uk or via the website www.steelhenge.co.uk

•Date: 28th July 2009• Region:UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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