OK so disaster recovery from computer perspective is a pet peeve of mine and what happened to the legal community (Law and Lawyers Post-Katrina) in New Orleans is a case in point. I lived in New Orleans during my high school years and know the city quite well. My mom and my sisters (both attorneys) weathered the storm in New Orleans and had to be rescued after watching neighbors perish and seeing their homes completely wiped out. Let's just say that Katrina had a huge impact on all of us and my mom and sisters are still in the process of rebuilding their lives. So I realize that the destruction of computers and data is trivial compared to the lost of life and the emotional damage suffered by the survivors.
BUT while nature wreaked havoc on the New Orleans and we will debate for quite a while how much of it was preventable, the damage to computers and data, both private and public, was almost entirely preventable. How so? Well to begin with, backups and off-site storage for tapes would have been a good start. If you are lucky and your off-site storage site wasn't flooded then perhaps all you lost was a week or less of critical data. However my twenty years in IT has proved that most small to medium size businesses (and many large ones) do not even do the basics correctly. What is more, even if you did, if your entire infrastructure was wiped out (e.g. your network) then the potential recovery might last months or more. Bottom line is that partnering with a hosted solutions provider (e.g. Vericenter) with "hot" sites potentially available in remote locations solves many of these problems and prevents the computing recovery from contributing to the disaster.
Attorneys and many other professional services providers need to get out of the computer/data management business and focus on practicing law, medicine, consulting etc. Managing this stuff in house is becoming more and more a losing proposition. Why bother when these services are available 24/7 from a utility provider? The trend is captured in an article by Nicholas Carr.
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