Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Preparing for the Big Meeting at 9 AM Today!!!

The recent Astroworld Festival tragedy - 8 fans were killed - is absolutely awful and I feel awful for the 8 families who are facing the reality that they have experienced a terrible loss. Maybe they watched their loved one leave. Maybe they didn't say any words to their loved one, as I've done before when Alex has gone to a concert without me. Whatever the case, it's absolutely awful.

Matt Walsh talked about it yesterday Music Festival Turns Deadly.

CNN noted that the Operations plan for Astroworld Festival did not include contingency for surging crowd and that's what piqued my interest. I work on disaster recovery documentation which is, in a way, an operations play for a disaster that destroys UIHC IT systems. It brings to mind the discussions I've had with various SMEs about the scenario for a disaster and what is needed in disaster recovery documentation. I recall one discussion with a SME vividly. He talked about how in one of his classes as he was earning his MBA, his professor talked about how he was involved in the disaster recovery plan for a company on 9/11/2001. The SME told me that this professor said the first step was to get the backup tapes from, yes, one of the twin towers that had fallen that day.

How do you plan for that? How do you plan for the unthinkable? "If an airplane flies into the twin towers, a second backup tape is located in [some other location]." From the beginning of that company's existence through the moment that the plane struck the twin tower, including that sentence would be viewed as extra and irrelevant. In fact, if I were editing that disaster recovery plan, I would have easily removed that sentence.

But that's the thing about the work I do on a daily basis. It's making a prediction about the future.

Today, I have a meeting with an auditor. Prior to starting in my current job, an auditor would "ding" my employer about how their disaster recovery plan was not centralized, which has become the central theme of my daily work. Not today, but in the future, I want to incorporate the above CNN article into any future PowerPoint presentations I prepare for any future meetings about my disaster recovery documentation.

Editor's Note: This is The Matt Walsh Show episode that is referenced in the link above. It was a good episode and worth embedding.

No comments: