scienceplease 2
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 06 Apr 2009
Posts: 1702
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 Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2010 8:44 pm Post subject: IBM and the Disaster Recovery Miracle |
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This is an extract of a statement by Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO, sent out to all IBM staff on 21st September 2001:
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To: IBM Colleagues
From: L.V. Gerstner, Jr.
Subject: Our Response to the Crisis
Dear Colleague:
I want to bring you up to date on how our company and our people are responding to the traumatic events of September 11. In my previous notes to you, I've written about the effort to account for more than 2,000 IBMers in the affected areas, including all those with home addresses near the World Trade Center. The effort was immediate and exhaustive. I want to thank all of our colleagues who helped in this vital work, especially our managers and team leaders….[snip] It's not possible to capture, in a single note, the scale of the response that was mobilized on behalf of our business and government customers, literally within minutes of the first attack. But behind every one of these customer stories, behind hundreds of servers and 5,000 workstations shipped, 12,000 ThinkPads configured, scores of applications brought back online, and more than 100,000 square feet of temporary facilities outfitted for customers, there are IBM people. The client teams mobilized, of course. Behind them, supporting them, have been 600 customer engineers and customer service representatives, plus 200 project managers and consultants in our business recovery unit alone not to mention at least another 1,000 services people locally and thousands of colleagues across the company assisting in this work. |
No client let down. Recovered dozens of companies in just 10 days. Amazing stuff. IBM just happened to have all that kit just ready to roll and all that data backed-up and recovered.
Lou resigned from IBM at the end of 2002. In January, 2003, he assumed the position of chairman of The Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm located in Washington, DC. He retired from that position in October 2008 and remains a senior advisor to The Carlyle Group.
Just for balance...
In other time both before and since, about 40% of businesses hit by disasters go bankrupt because of lack of disaster planning. Commercial businesses are lousy at DR planning, but not the military - they have processes and procedures to protect themselves from attack...
Er.... Not on 9/11.
Over at the Pentagon, all the financial data on the DoD's $2.2 trillion budget accounting hole (announced the day before by Donald Rumsfeld) was lost. Who'd have believed it, but a plane was tracked coming towards the Pentagon, circled around missing all the general's offices and flew into the newly furbished part of the building which housed the audit department and unbacked-up financial computer systems. It took the DoD years to get their finances in order - they had to go back to original source documents invoices and payments and recreate the ledgers. About $800 billion of that $2.2trillion was never accounted for...
Despite the fact that Cheney knew the plane was approaching the pentagon, no order to shoot down the plane or evacuate the building, with no TV cameras pointing to the skies (I guessed nobody told the TV companies about the hijacked aircraft); And the people that were killed were highly prized Financial Auditors and Naval Intelligence staff (obviously surplus to requirements for the War on Terror)!
The response to the disaster was immediate: the FBI seizing nearby CCTV tapes from local hotels and businesses and recovering aircraft debris from the crime scene... To determine what hit the Pentagon? Well, probably not since no air crash investigation has ever been carried out... |
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