Free registration required to read this fascinating story of a business’ recovery - including IT recovery - from the Katrina disaster. Michael Ybarra of SearchCIO.com writes:

Oreck Corp. thought it had a disaster recovery plan. Then Hurricane Katrina struck. To keep the business alive, a dedicated crew of executives and staff had to surmount huge obstacles. Here is their story.

Prologue: The Forecast

When Michael Evanson left his office at Oreck Corp. in New Orleans on Friday, Aug. 26, he didn’t know if he would be coming back to work on Monday. Out in the Atlantic Ocean, a Category 2 hurricane named Katrina was churning toward the southern coast of the U.S., but the National Hurricane Center predicted that the storm would miss New Orleans before its expected landfall on Monday. Late Friday the forecast changed: Katrina might hit the city. Evanson, the vice president of IT at Oreck, alerted IBM’s disaster recovery unit that the privately held vacuum cleaner maker might be in for some heavy weather. In his two years at the company, Evanson had had to flee headquarters only once because of a storm, but even then he didn’t have to switch to a backup data center. The company had done that only during tests.

[Read The Long Road Back]

[tags]katrina,it,disaster,recovery[/tags]