Hurricane Season and Disaster Recovery By Jennie Wang August 2015 marked the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 major hurricane causing severe destruction along the Gulf coast. It was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. The destruction and fatalities caused by the event made it the deadliest US hurricane since 1928. Katrina had a significant impact on public health, New Orleans’ economy as a port city, and public policy affecting hurricane defense and population displacement. As a resident of New York City, InvestCloud can closely recall the secondcostliest hurricane, known commonly as Superstorm Sandy, which was a Category 3 hurricane that affected 24 states in the US and will see its third anniversary in October 2015. Its impact was so severe that the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq closed for two days due to power outages and flooding in the tri-state area. The economic impact of this event trickled down to various sectors, including communications and transportation, as the hurricane flooded the streets of New York, New Jersey, and even destroyed parts of the subways. The aftermath of Sandy, coupled with New York’s role as a major player in the global economy, brought a growing focus on disaster recovery in the financial technology industry. Maintaining a readily available disaster recovery plan, one that would allow for the high availability of vital technology infrastructure in the event of a natural disaster, became a requirement and a hot topic of discussion. Many organizations have shared their experiences and lessons learned, and it is important to reflect on those experiences and how they have affected subsequent DR plans. These are InvestCloud’s takeaways that are still in place today. Lesson #1: Always take care of your employees. Any time disaster strikes, whether it is human-caused or natural, know that employees will focus on their own safety and the safety of their families. Businesses should be prepared for this mindset. Lesson #2: Disaster recovery plans should cover varying scale and length. The requirements of a 1 day power outage versus a 1 week outage are very different. If a business has multiple offices in different time zones or regions of the world that might not have been affected by the disaster, coverage for a single day is feasible, but employees taking on additional coverage responsibility might exhaust their additional capacity after a full week. Lesson #3: Ensure that alternative forms of communication are available when
needed. The FCC reported that 25% of cell phone towers lost power during Sandy. Be sure that there are other ways through which staff can communicate to each other. Lesson #4: It is ideal to have at least two alternate data centers. After 9/11, many New York based companies had their backup data centers brought closer to home in New Jersey, to ensure that their data centers were accessible in person. However, Sandy affected both New York as well as New Jersey, which highlighted the fact that having two redundant alternates, one nearby in addition to one further away, is ideal. Lesson #5: Ask your vendors about their disaster recovery plans and understand them. If you rely heavily on your vendors, be sure to get comfortable with their disaster recovery plans. There is no such thing as too much preparation if you are heavily dependent on their services. Lesson #6: Test your plan. Make sure your disaster recovery plan is thoroughly tested in an integrated fashion. If there are two alternate data centers, be sure that failover across the two is smooth. Lesson #7: Be sure your disaster recovery plans are detailed, and your crisis management plan should have a clear outline of who the leaders and key decision-makers are. Moreover, there should be multiple leaders to ensure that employees do not have to wait for a single senior executive to move forward in recovery, in the event that clear communication is not available for that individual. If you would like more information on InvestCloud and how we address disaster recovery, contact us at 888-800-0188 or visit us at www.investcloud.com. Jennie Wang, Vice President of Business Development at InvestCloud, started her career in the financial services industry in 2008. She served on the Fund Administration team at Vastardis Fund Services, focusing on private equity and asset allocator clients, where she was responsible for a team administering over $10 billion in assets. She then moved to join the Product Development team at Envisor Technologies in 2012. Jennie has been a part of the InvestCloud team since 2015. She holds a bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University.