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Y2k —a Mixed Bag for Disaster Recovery Pros.

The year 2000 date rollover crisis has had both positive and negative effects on the disaster recovery field, long-time observers say.
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On the positive side, it drew a lot of attention to establishing contingency plans and had companies talking to their vendors and suppliers about disaster scenarios, says Dan Bailey, senior manager at Protiviti Inc., a risk consulting company in Dallas, and a member of the professional groups DRI International and the Association of Contingency Planners.

But Y2k turned out to be a nonevent because of the efforts that went into fixing systems. But the success of those efforts created credibility problems for disaster recovery specialists and led to complacency among senior executives, Bailey says.

Chief financial officers who OK'd $20 million to upgrade systems for Y2k-only to have nothing happen-may wonder whether that was money well spent, says Tim DeLisle, managing principal at Corigelan LLC, a disaster recovery consultancy in Chicago. If IT asks for another $30 million to upgrade disaster recovery capabilities, those executives are going to be skeptical, so "you need to build a business case for risk management," DeLisle says.

The other post-Y2k problem is that some companies figure they addressed all their disaster recovery issues in the Y2k plan that's sitting on the shelf. But many of their systems and operations have changed since 1999, so those plans are virtually worthless now unless they've been updated, DeLisle says.

Copyright © 2004. Computerworld.