Govt. and private clients of disaster-recovery IT providers like ...
Govt. and private clients of disaster-recovery IT providers like SunGard need to press for more options in IT system packages, a Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) official told the congressionally created Information Security & Privacy Advisory Board at its Thurs.…
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meeting. Providers currently offer short-term plans for IT systems, services and space for customers displaced by emergency or disaster, but there’s too little demand to offer long-term plans, said Gil Hawk, CIO for USDA’s National Finance Center, which handles that agency’s data center and payroll services. SunGard, IBM and other IT behemoths provide “cold sites” -- basically warehouses with IT systems and network services. The Center leased a SunGard cold site in Philadelphia last year after closing its New Orleans facility in advance of Hurricane Katrina. In such instances, SunGard has a “subscription service” guaranteeing “like” equipment -- not necessarily what customers request -- for 6 weeks maximum, after which gear is “ripped out from under you” and given to other customers, Hawk said. Such sites are strictly short-term solutions; the one in Philadelphia would have cost $25 million to buy -- not a bad price but too much upfront, Hawk said. But “don’t single out SunGard,” he told board member and Cornell U. Prof. Fred Schneider, who asked whether SunGard’s model is bad for agencies in duress. The industry standard for disaster recovery is 30 days, and the Center has pressed SunGard and IBM to recast these services to agency emergency needs -- a lost cause unless more customers demand that, Hawk said. The CIO described to a clearly-moved board the Center’s “absolutely phenomenal” 7-week stint building the Philadelphia data center -- normally a 9-12 month job -- and its gradual “migration” from SunGard subscription products to a permanent equipment base, amid turmoil in its New Orleans office. SunGard gives priority in its services to clients who declare an “emergency,” a cry customers use less often than might be thought, Hawk said: “Just to declare [an emergency before Katrina hit] cost us $700,000. If we had been wrong, it’s an expensive mistake.” The Center’s New Orleans facility reopened quickly, since it wasn’t damaged, and within a week shifted the local workforce to a server-based, remote-access Citrix platform based in Philadelphia, with an added encryption layer from Secure Remote. The Center’s only previous experience with remote access was Web-based interfaces for employee e-mail and external-customer access, Hawk said.