The other, more important reason? He wanted to see how his IT staff reacted.

What DR and BC expert Paul Kirvan has found too often is that a lack of disaster recovery documentation is stymieing the best-laid and expensive – costing into the millions — DR strategies.

It’s not simply that they don’t have disaster recovery documentation, but if they do, people can’t understand it.

In one recent instance, a CIO ran through a disaster recovery scenario, and it went off smoothly, thanks to one all-star on the staff who knew how to recover everything off the top of his head.

“I asked, ‘What if he’s sick of on vacation?’” Kirvan said.

His point is that the documentation has to be simple enough and consistent enough for anyone on staff to be able to step in and recover a system — so simple that, even if your IT staff can’t perform the function for some reason, a non-IT person could.

To help get your staff on the same disaster recovery documentation page, Kirvan suggests checking out disaster recovery software, plan templates and guides, a list of which has been compiled by fellow industry expert Phillip Rothstein.

The funniest comment regarding my article this week on SearchCIO.com about Austin Powder Co.’s DR plan, post-virtualization, to make its HQ a hot site for its remote data centers came from “Richard” via email: “Sorry, but when I saw the tag line on this article ['A powder keg of BC and DR planning'] and the opening sentence, ‘blasting through,’ I thought it was April 1!” he wrote. “And later in the article, the reference to Symantec reminded me of Semtex, and made the article even more explosive! I just hope these folks don’t lose track of any of their explosives products in their quest for virtualization.”

I emailed Richard to share that my copyeditor and I had had similar chuckles. However, I should add how impressed I am by the IT vision at Austin Powder, a company that was founded in 1833 and has seen more general ledgers in various formats than most enterprises.

The best wisdom of the week came from another Richard — Dick Csaplar, of the Aberdeen Group in Boston. “A disaster plan ages very quickly,” he said; disaster recovery solutions are a constant effort: “You are never done. People in charge of doing this need to stay on top of it. The people who pay attention and update their disaster plans are among the best-of-class organizations.”

Companies of all sizes can benefit from this lesson, as demonstrated by another story source, Greg Schulz, author of The Green and Virtual Data Center, and founder of The Server and Storage I/O Group in Stillwater, Minn. His own BC/DR strategy involves three laptops: a small one he uses for travel, a bigger one in his office, and another one as a backup. He’s not into the “less laptop” trend, but is going toward a more robust laptop using virtualization to seamlessly move his workloads wherever he happens to be: on the road, on an airplane, in his office.

And Austin Powder Network Administrator Chris Benco described how shared storage, added to the company’s virtualized environment, enables him to do the same thing among the main site and two remote data centers. Now the company not only is protected, but also can proactively move workloads to avoid a storm in one area, perform maintenance in another, whatever.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Laura Smith, Features Writer.

One of my colleagues attended a conference during the no-fly period, and saw first-hand how technology can aid business continuity: A keynote speaker who was stranded in Europe did his talk via live videoconference, even responding to questions that popped up live or via Twitter.

This story was still rolling through my mind as I read Senior News Writer Linda Tucci’s story this week about business continuity and the volcano. Prior to that, I’d been thinking of disaster recovery and business continuity more in terms of the physical limitations of people being unable to travel, but she investigates the supply chain management nightmare created by the lack of air travel for days on end.

The message? You could have an excellent supply chain management strategy – but if you don’t have the disaster recovery and business continuity plan to back it up, it won’t do you a whole lot of good when it matters the most.

Do you have a successful disaster recovery or business continuity story that worked — or didn’t, and you learned an important lesson from it? What’s your supply chain management strategy when things go wrong? I’d love to hear your story; please e-mail me at rlebeaux@techtarget.com.

For the most part, the answer was no. Enterprises are not rushing to get rid of hot, cold or primary sites, despite how much it costs to maintain them, to replace them with a site in the cloud.

The undertaking is potentially enormous, just in the planning stages, to make sure your architecture can even be replicated in a cloud environment, they said.

It is not inconceivable that large companies’ business continuity strategies will shift to the cloud, even as a means of housing their primary data center. The cost benefits could be equally, well, enormous, in terms of closing the physical building housing the data center. The cost of maintaining the data center’s power and cooling systems also goes away, along with hardware upgrades and the IT staff that maintains the data center.

Dave Linthicum, an independent consultant, said his clients’ future plans could involve a reverse data center model in which their primary data center would live in the cloud and the secondary site would be maintained on their own premises, or even on yet another cloud provider’s premises.

Still, we’re talking distant future here. Backing up applications in the cloud is a no-brainer, experts said, but backing up an entire infrastructure is not. It’s just too hard to replicate such an environment down to specific configurations within a cloud environment.

Does your business continuity strategy involve the cloud, or are there too many unknowns? Email me at ctorode@techtarget.com.

According to the official WordPress blog (which I assume was also unavailable during the downtime), the problems were likely the result of an “unscheduled change to a core router by one of our data center providers [that] messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and it broke the site.” Worse, the outage broke all of the company’s mechanisms for failover in San Antonio and Chicago.

I’ll be interested to hear about WordPress’ stopgap solutions in the case of blog failure. In the meantime, I’m left to ponder — and point out to our readers — that having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan isn’t necessary only for such catastrophes as hurricanes — or a massive data breach that leaves you scrambling to explain to irate customers what went wrong (I gather that WordPress did an admirable job updating users via Twitter during the outage). But how do you prove this to the business so you can get the resources you need? Consider piggybacking disaster recovery efforts on other projects or mapping availability risk.

The WordPress problems also underscore the importance of properly vetting your providers, whose data center outage could negatively affect your business and its customers. For more information about assessing potential sourcing partners, check out our FAQ on getting started with IT outsourcing.

“When you talk about having a plan that could cost $20,000, $50,000 or $100,000, and might sit on a shelf and gather dust, for most business leaders, it’s ‘Excuse me, I have a business to run,’” said Paul Kirvan, a business continuity consultant based in New Jersey.

I heard a lot of variations on that attitude in my reporting this week for a story on mapping key risk indicators and key performance indicators in order to prove the value of business continuity (BC) programs. BC plans are a tough sell and not only because of those business leaders who’d rather spend money on making money.

The field is young — only about 35 years old, Kirvan told me. And the tools of the trade are not all that sophisticated. Quantifying the impact of a business-disrupting event that hasn’t happened, in order to craft a sound plan for getting back to business, is a soft science.

So soft, in fact, that Ramon Krikken, an analyst with Burton Group, has found that anecdotes about the bad things that have happened to other companies — good, old-fashioned horror stories — continue to be among the more powerful tools continuity specialists possess for convincing upper management that business continuity plans hold value.

In the United States there’s another element at play that makes it hard to get funding for BC — what Kirvan calls the “cultural dimension.”

Business continuity is viewed differently in the U.K. and other European countries from the way it is here, said Kirvan, who has worked extensively in the United Kingdom and is also a board member of the Business Continuity Institute. Of course, Great Britain is the source of arguably the industry’s most accepted business continuity standard, BS 25999. But it’s not just a matter of standards or certification, he said.

“The culture over [in the UK] tends to be one of anticipating potential problems,” he said. Business continuity is taken seriously, he said, perhaps because of issues with the IRA over the years and more recently, the 2007 terrorist bombings.

“Our culture, by contrast, with the pioneer spirit, that can-do, ‘We can handle anything, just throw it at us’ attitude, doesn’t take that view,” Kirvan said. American businesses are focused on the present and tend to believe the future will always be brighter.

“The typical reaction I have seen over the years from American businesses is that, ‘Well, we have never had a major issue, why should we worry about it? We’ll deal with it when it occurs,’” he said.

What about at your company?

A business continuity plan is your company’s prescription for things that you can expect to go wrong: components will fail, servers will fail, network outages are going to happen, IT professionals make mistakes. Disaster recovery is your plan for the things you can’t anticipate. “If you’re doing this Calvin and Hobbes scenario, where planes are falling from the sky, that is when you’re talking a disaster recovery plan,” Shacochis said.

Savvis, with 29 data centers, likes to boast it is has built the architecture required to give companies business continuity, which in turn gets rolled into its standardized services. “Virtually all our products have a high-availability option that can be added on for pennies on the dollar,” he said. And many customers use those services as their DR site.

But the premise of a DR-in-a-box solution — promised by various providers — is, in his view, untenable.

“We don’t really know what your requirements are, we don’t really know what the nightmare scenario will be, you’re not really implementing anything with us, but trust us, when you pick up the phone we’ll be there, and we’ll get you a data center in a heartbeat,” Shacochis said. “Those sorts of services are not that difficult to sell because there are a lot of people who want to believe that they exist. But they are very difficult to execute on.”

In fact, Savvis has not gone to market with a catchall DR solution yet. “We don’t really believe that the process maturity across so many different customers is there, or the standardization across so many different architectures is there that would allow us to do it,” Shacochis said.

Shacochis, however, believes that there will be a really elegant solution that will ultimately be cheaper than the present multi-tiered DR solutions and better. His idea is that the kind of cloud computing platform that Savvis is building in its labs will enable it — eventually — to offer DR that is standardized, flexible and cost-attractive enough to customers to make it worthwhile. Shacochis envisions a platform that can function as a complete cloud data center.

“All the typical IT resources you get in a physical data center, we’re going to be building in a platform that will allow you to provision not just your compute resources on the network, but to provision actual data center topologies for routing, switching, security, load balancing and failover features, as well as computing, storage and storage lifecycle management resources that are all running in a software-based context that you can control over a portal, and eventually control via a software API,” he said.

The beauty of that model, he says, is that companies could provision their entire cloud application stack, get it up and implemented and then turn it off.

“That really would be a cloud DR model, where the customer is paying a small percentage of what they would ordinarily pay for production, and they would have a highly functional and easy to executive DR plan.”

When will we see this? He thinks it’s a year or two off. Sounds good to me.

Benchmarks for state-of-the-art RTO and RPO are one thing if your enterprise is already up to date with business continuity and disaster recovery. But these metrics — and affordable DR — can seem awfully abstract in the real world, I am discovering from CIOs, especially if the real world is the globe.

I recently got an email from Jiten Patel, CIO of the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA International), an amazing not-for-profit that provides microfinance services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs. You’d think with its 25-year successful history of village banking, not to mention high-profile support from uber-connected celebrities like actress Natalie Portman, FINCA would not be at a loss for good DR. And, indeed, setting an RPO and RTO benchmark for FINCA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., “is an easy conversation.”

But there was Patel, on business in Baku, Azerbaijan, explaining the difficulty of providing affordable DR at its microfinance operations in 21 countries around the globe:

“DR options in the developing countries are fairly limited and expensive propositions, and not something we can afford to have in place in every country. And unlike in the US where we have the likes of Sungard and IBM who offer such services at a reasonable cost, this is not the case in countries where we operate — one has to buy a box, which may sit there ‘cobwebbed’ — which is not a viable option and it adds to the financial burden.

“In light of this my strategy has been to centralize our infrastructure on a region-by-region basis, to use 3rd-party hosting providers who can provide more robust redundancy options, and to try and negotiate more affordable DR pricing, which where we can makes it much more palatable for the likes of us.

“It would be a boon for all of us NGOs who operate globally, if someone like Sungard or IBM offered such services at very affordable rates around the globe: Offering it just in the US for far -lung global operations is not viable.”

The world may be getting flatter, but the playing field is far from level when it comes to DR. And it is just a hunch, but disasters that shred data must be common in countries where electricity on any given day is not a given.