The Disaster Recovery Case Study We'll Never Forget


We all remember Hurricane Sandy and the wake of destruction it left in its path in 2012. Learn how one contingency planning and crisis management team became better business continuity planners and corporate disaster recovery plan experts from the experience.

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 Crisis Management before the storm

When Sandy was still a tropical storm, and not yet a hurricane, one contingency planning and crisis management team working in NYC began implementing their disaster recovery plan. This included:

  • Documenting and testing BC Plans and strategies
  • Closing offices ahead of time
  • Pre-positioning key staff

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As the storm traveled up the east coast and through the Jersey shore, lower Manhattan stocked up on food and supplies, battened down the hatches and prepared for the worst. At the height of Superstorm Sandy the home office was damaged and 1500 employees were displaced.

  • a loss of all utilities & security systems
  • underground parking garages were completely underwater
  • up to 4’ of water in the main lobby of the building with complete flooding of lower levels
  • Core infrastructure in lower levels damaged
  • Unclear duration of outage due to lack of clear communications with building management

Disaster Recovery begins

When the storm cleared and the water finally subsided, all staff members were accounted for through an Emergency Notification System. The corporate disaster recovery plan began. With the massive collateral damage to their building, local community, and regionally the CM team was overwhelmed managing equipment requests, issuing all crisis communications, coordinating alternate workspaces along with lodging and transportation of staff members. Their current plans assumed 6 – 8 weeks for recovery, however, the harsh reality from the hurricane’s damage meant that they would instead be displaced for an entire year!

 

The Business Continuity consulting cavalry arrives 

The team needed guidance to contingency planning and crisis management operations. Virtual Corporation business continuity and disaster recovery consulting services stepped in. With an extended recovery process on the horizon, a crisis command center needed to be put in place.

This newly created command center would serve as the centralized hub for receiving & processing request and ensure that key tasks & objectives would be managed in a unified and effective manner. Once the center was staffed and organized along with ICS best practices, the executive liaison and crisis commander could focus on the bigger picture and get back to their daily objectives.

By using a formal crisis command center, the crisis team was able to eliminate the single-points of failure, reduced team members from “burning out,” effectively accounted for staff members, improved timelines of status reports, easily communicated priorities to/from executives, and easily managed lodging & staff transportation.

Lessons learned:

  • A properly structured Command Center is essential
  • Proper tools MUST be available to enable comprehensive situational awareness
  • Facilitates proper threat assessment and intelligence gathering
  • Serves as centralized point of communication and situational awareness
  • Provides back-up to our Security Operations Center
  • Affords immediate linkage to ICS model for BC/DR testing

Strategic BCP Resilience One


Conclusion:

Not having a pre-established Command Center can significantly delay or impair crisis communications, coordination, leadership, recovery, and physical security.

  Learn more about Virtual Corporation's crisis management & disaster recovery tools by contacting us today

Resilience, organizational resilience, business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management

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