From TNPC issue #4.07...

Internet Disaster Planning

by T.J. Lee
April 5, 2001

As Lee discusses in his article in this issue, it's sometimes a real pain just trying to keep your email flowing. And companies are become very dependent on email in particular and the Internet in general.

Most companies have disaster plans for what to do in the event o of bomb threats to their buildings or storms that may snow in the city preventing workers from getting to the office, but not many have addressed the issue of what they'll do if the Internet goes down for any significant amount of time.

A number of companies got a taste of this possibility when NorthPoint, a DSL provider that has fallen on hard times, suddenly announced that the cash deal they worked out with AT&T (who is buying NorthPoint's assets through a bankruptcy sale) was deemed to be insufficient to keep the DSL service going for the 30 days. NorthPoint said they could not give current clients notice that they needed to replace their DSL service and just started pulling plugs.

Lee and I head a consulting firm, PRIME Consulting Group, Inc., and this NorthPoint closure affected several of our clients who started wondering about how an Internet failure would affect their day-to-day operations.

Most companies are a lot more dependent on the Internet than they realize. Not only email, but file transfers, order systems (e- commerce), internal applications, and information distribution all run over the Internet and the Web. When companies can't get online, work has a tendency to just stop. And we're not talking about an outage measured in hours. What will you do when you can't get online for days or weeks?

We've started laying out a disaster program for one of our clients and we see this as a service that will grow as there are more glitches with the Internet that take longer to get resolved.

If your company has a disaster plan for Internet failure in place I'd sure like to hear from you. I'd like to gauge the interest on this topic so I can plan future articles and get a feel for how large a perceived threat this possibility is.

You can reach T.J. Lee at:
mailto:planning@PRIMEConsulting.com

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