In the Wake of Katrina

While New Orleans was immersed in water, people, property and means all were being compromised... some businesses made money

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Come a mishap and people get a lifetime opportunity to make it big out of it. But these incidents leave much to be learnt. The same happened when Katrina kissed the gulf coast of America on the August 28, 2005. 

Thanks to the Internet, innumerable websites were put up immediately asking you to donate for those hit by the hurricane that packed 160 mph winds. Each one said that they would send the money and other material help to the people affected and help them rehabilitate.

But if you donated at one of these sites, are you sure that help reached the needy? Well, not in all cases. Some of them did collect the money but only to fill their bags. On the other hand, there were people who went out of their way with technology to help the affected. People had set up blogs giving out information about the havoc, misplaced people, those who had lost their family and so on. Since Katrina knocked out power to the offices, broke down all contacts and resources, the need of the hour was to recover data from being lost. Thus, came to action the recovery firms. Emergency mail systems were activated that would merge all sent and received items from the standby accounts created to the original mail program after the storm settled. 

The disaster recovery industry grossed peak revenues while all others registered losses. Backup solutions providers made big bucks. Even companies like HP and IBM set out teams to restore and bring back the endangered data in the affected areas of America. Though the losses were immense (considering death toll in thousands), deadly Katrina also set another instance when the effectiveness of BCPs and the best of the DR systems were put to test. An important lesson that most organizations in and out of America learnt was that of storing the backup offsite. 

There were incidents of ID thefts. Phishing e-mail campaigns were up and running that tricked users to revealing their credit card numbers to a website that looked like the one run by Red Cross. Such mishaps could have been avoided by being alert. Typing in the address of the charitable website in the browser is a safer option than clicking on the links provided in the mail or advertisements. 

Rinku Tyagi

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