IT disaster recovery

But what happens when the disaster isn't just a deleted folder? What if the building physically burns to the ground, you lose the servers, the network switches, and crucially, you lose the master backup server itself?

You have just described the ultimate catch-22 of disaster recovery.

It is so stressful to even think about.

It really is.

How do you break that cycle?

The text is adamant about the solution, and it is startlingly analog.

You must have a physical paper disaster recovery binder stored off-site alongside the tapes.

Paper, like actual dead trees.

So health systems, they must map exactly... which workflows are depending on which models, right? So a single safety issue doesn't take down the entire operations itself, right? So as long as we have that map in place so we know which model went dark and we can quickly substitute with it or we can quickly fall back to a human-in-the-loop mechanism, I think that would be essential.

And those decisions, I mean, as you said, it's a disaster recovery, basically.

They're all disaster recovery drills.

So that must be in place for any system that is using AI.

So it's mandatory.

Here's the thing, though.

Think about how you have designed your disaster recovery scenarios.

What happens if people just start plinking AWS data center cooling towers, right? So we saw this, was it Arizona, New Mexico? I talked about this a few months ago, is there is a data center that went 100% down.

It wasn't an Amazon data center.

But that doesn't mean extreme weather isn't on the way.

And with proposed FEMA reforms putting disaster recovery funds into question, could muni bonds come to the rescue? That's next.

Welcome back.

California declaring a state of emergency ahead of what is likely to become a historic El Nino event.

In this episode, we're looking at the recovery from the Los Angeles wildfires and the lessons for the adaptation sector.

You'll hear from experts working on disaster recovery and resilient rebuilding, someone who survived the fires and is now helping her community recover, And we'll look at remediation, the dangers facing immigrant workers doing cleanup, and some of the difficult choices communities face after disaster.

We'll also hear what happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a devastating series of earthquakes.

More than 15 years later, that experience offers some important lessons for the adaptation sector.

But in theory, that would be slow.

That would be slower.

That would be people stepping back to say, how do you do this better? But I think if we had a plan, if we had a disaster recovery district that had a system where we could prioritize what's important to the community, then we could implement some of these resilience measures while not slowing down at all.

All right.

If the automated payment portal is locked by ransomware, the BCP dictates how the accounting team will manually process invoices using paper and pen so the company does not go bankrupt.

Third is the DRP, or Disaster Recovery Plan.

This is owned by the IT operations team.

Their job is to rebuild the burned-down infrastructure, spin up the backup servers in the cloud, and restore the data so the business can eventually return to normal.

That you can in tiny D. Yeah.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is introducing recovery plans for orchestrated application recovery.

This automates multiple server application recovery by letting customers define a sequential launch order once rather than manually coordinating server startup during a disaster event.

The feature supports configurable wait times between recovery steps, optional approval gates for human oversight, and non-destructive drill mode for testing procedures without impacting production systems.

it

or it's CloudFormation under the hood, right? Or that kind of thing.

Yeah, but like, but ideally, you know, the problem with this is that it requires you to remember like, oh, hey, I need to go update the disaster recovery plan where it'd be nicer if I could declare dependencies in tagging that this would then pick up and dynamically generate the recovery plan.

Yeah.