What would you do?: "Location" is unavailable for 1-7 days, can you work elsewhere?

[TheCotMan]

(It has been a week. :-)

Location(1):
If you are employed, consider the location in distress is the place you work.
If you are still a student and not employed, the assume the location is your school.
If you are unemployed, retired, home-employed, and not going to school, then assume the location in distress is your home.

A disaster has happened at Location(1). Assume the disaster is such that there is risk to life if you should go to your Location(1). Maybe it is radiation, or biological, or a crazed lunatic NASA shuttle gang wearing diapers, wielding deadly weapons. Whatever the reason, any trip to your Location would be one-way, and would likely end in death.

Now assume, there will be rolling blackouts that may last from 30 seconds to one hour at that Location(1), and you have nobody left on-site after the mandatory evacuation and there is a 25% chance every hour for a blackout period to hit your Location(1). Assume that the problems prohibiting you from going to Location(1) could be resolved in as little at 24 hours, but maybe as long as one week.

Do you have everything you need to work available to you? Do you have off-site backups in another city? Can your servers tolerate a loss of power on the grid? Do you have UPS? If your servers will be gracefully shut down, will they come up in the proper order-- assuming you have a dependency list? (E.G. DHCP, tftp server, routers, DNS, samba servers, windows servers, etc.)

How long would it take for you to get your operation back up and running at a new location?

Do you have credit cards, ATM cards, ID sufficient to survive while away from your Location(1)?

How will you announce the problem to your employees? Do you have a phone tree in place to let people know where they should meet instead of the normal Location(1)? If you have a phone tree in place, is there a call validation or call-back? Will people recognize the voice of those that call them? Do you have sufficient checks to ensure the call tree is not abused to be a significant risk for a Meat-Layer DoS?

If you will be working at a new location, do you have access to all of the resources necessary for you to continue your work? Will you be able to get access to the missing resources?

If you have VoIP phones, how long would it take to get a new subnet allocated with your provider and associated such that they will ring at your new network? f you have POTS phones, can you re-route ringing to new locations quickly enough? If you have a Location(1) on-site PBX and a T1-T3, is there anything you can do remotely to the PBX to get calls forwarded? ISDN/Watson, same question.

Even if you are not running a company, you can describe how you would deal with this in your personal life.

Your thoughts?

[DaKahuna]

Re: What would you do?: "Location" is unavailable for 1-7 days, can you work elsewher

A disaster has happened at Location(1). Assume the disaster is such that there is risk to life if you should go to your Location(1). Maybe it is radiation, or biological, or a crazed lunatic NASA shuttle gang wearing diapers, wielding deadly weapons. Whatever the reason, any trip to your Location would be one-way, and would likely end in death.

Now assume, there will be rolling blackouts that may last from 30 seconds to one hour at that Location(1), and you have nobody left on-site after the mandatory evacuation and there is a 25% chance every hour for a blackout period to hit your Location(1). Assume that the problems prohibiting you from going to Location(1) could be resolved in as little at 24 hours, but maybe as long as one week.

My company provides remote access capability which includes full network access. Not being able to have physical access to the building I work in would not be an inconvenience at all.

Do you have everything you need to work available to you? Do you have off-site backups in another city? Can your servers tolerate a loss of power on the grid? Do you have UPS? If your servers will be gracefully shut down, will they come up in the proper order-- assuming you have a dependency list? (E.G. DHCP, tftp server, routers, DNS, samba servers, windows servers, etc.)

The facility is equipped with an UPS and I have an UPS on my desktop which will run it for approximately 45 minutes. All of my information is located on my desktop, with a backup to a 2nd hard drive in the same system every week.

Additionally, many of my files and current projects are stored on a server in the data center which is backed up on a daily basis.

I have access to both of these resources when working remotely.

How long would it take for you to get your operation back up and running at a new location?

If the facility blew up, then it would take weeks or potentially a month for me to try and put most of my data back together. Anything on the server could be restored within three to seven days.

Do you have credit cards, ATM cards, ID sufficient to survive while away from your Location(1)?

Yes.

How will you announce the problem to your employees? Do you have a phone tree in place to let people know where they should meet instead of the normal Location(1)? If you have a phone tree in place, is there a call validation or call-back? Will people recognize the voice of those that call them? Do you have sufficient checks to ensure the call tree is not abused to be a significant risk for a Meat-Layer DoS?

We have a formal notification process as well as a number which employee's at my location can call and receive a voice notification of any issues. We use both during periods of inclement weather to notifiy employee's whether or not the facility is closed. All of this is documented in the company business recovery plan and the disaster recovery plan for the site.

If you will be working at a new location, do you have access to all of the resources necessary for you to continue your work? Will you be able to get access to the missing resources?

In addition to working from home, there are at least half a dozen company locations in the area, many of which are closer to my home than my office, from which I could work. Our Remote Access SSL VPN provides for a full network connection and I can work just effective remotely as I can from my desk.

If you have VoIP phones, how long would it take to get a new subnet allocated with your provider and associated such that they will ring at your new network? f you have POTS phones, can you re-route ringing to new locations quickly enough? If you have a Location(1) on-site PBX and a T1-T3, is there anything you can do remotely to the PBX to get calls forwarded? ISDN/Watson, same question.

We have VoIP and it a new subnet could be allocated in a matter of minutes. Transferring the numbers would be more difficult. Provided power to my facility is up and working, I would call forward my phone to my cellular phone. Since my customers are the company's employee's they would be aware of the situation and notification through Outlook's "Out of Office" I could notify everyone to use my cell phone number to contact me.