Thu, May 15, 2008 — CIO — Hancock Bank, a century-old institution headquartered on Mississippi's hurricane-prone Gulf Coast, likes to boast that it will be the last to close and the first to open when stormy weather shuts down area businesses. That claim got the severest test imaginable when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in 2005. "We were hurt badly," says Ron Milliet, the bank's director of IT services.

Hancock's IT department, which serves 150 sites across four states, took a major hit, of course, but it could have been worse. The bank found that the relatively small number of servers it had virtualized (the project had just begun when Katrina hit) could be recovered in hours, while the physical servers took days, says Milliet. Many critical services were up within 24 hours.

Virtualization steals the spotlight, but it's just one of the innovative tools now available to CIOs who are rethinking their disaster recovery and business continuity strategies. Techniques including WAN optimization and appliance-based e-mail backup are reducing recovery times, lowering costs and most importantly, raising confidence levels that business will continue even after a major disaster. As for good old tape, it's still a backup mainstay, but CIOs are looking for supplementary technologies that can be used to overcome the venerable media's limitations.

Not only are CIOs adopting new disaster recovery technologies, "they are asking themselves what disaster recovery will do to improve business as a whole," says Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions for the Forsythe Solutions Group. That could mean, for example, leveraging IT assets acquired during a merger by putting the excess capacity to work as a backup or mirror site, or making underutilized resources part of a disaster recovery arsenal.

And because there are a wealth of new disaster recovery strategies available, customers are now in a stronger-than-ever position to cut affordable and flexible deals with vendors running offsite recovery services such as SunGard and IBM, says Croy.

The Virtual Solution

Gamblers look at a casino and see slot machines, roulette wheels, bars and restaurants. But for an IT exec, the same casino is a river of data and applications that must keep flowing 24 hours a day, no excuses accepted.

The Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City, N.J., had been using a traditional tape backup solution, but it was "slow and inconsistent. We were in a labor-intensive manual world," says John Forelli, the resort's VP of information technology.