Leader: Is disaster recovery talk in poor taste?

Anybody broaching the subject of disaster recovery treads a very thin line between common sense and poor taste.

We may not want to talk about these things but companies must consider every worst case scenario. This past week one of the silicon.com team was out in San Francisco talking about one of that city's most obvious worst case scenarios - an earthquake of the magnitude of the 1906 and 1989 quakes.

Is it in poor taste for companies to plan for such things? Of course it isn't. In fact any Bay Area business which doesn't think about every action it must take if a serious earthquake hits is naïve to the point of irresponsibility.

Of course the first questions which need to be answered will naturally relate to human welfare - is everybody all right? But companies must also plan for how they will keep people working if they cannot enter the city or do not want to. Likewise they must ensure business can continue as normal.

But it remains a tricky sell for vendors to make and an even trickier one for them to talk about publicly.

There are companies out there who exist solely to service the disaster recovery and business continuity market and so it goes without saying it is in their best interests to talk about it. And whether we like it or not these are services that are required by businesses.

Back-up, communications, data centres, data recovery, mirroring, redundancy - these are people's bread and butter in a time of crisis and are all issues, whether you think you're planning for a power cut or a terrorist attack.

But then there are those companies whose service or product delivers an almost coincidental side-benefit of business continuity. At what point do they play the 'disaster card'?

Take Citrix for example, a company mentioned in our earthquake piece, which got a foot in the door because staff at the Union of California Bank wanted to work from home. But the bank's head of contingency saw a strong business continuity benefit to using Citrix's products too.

Citrix is no stranger to this fact - the company has gone big recently on how it could keep people working if a bird flu pandemic takes hold and nobody wants to venture out of doors. All the time this sounds like it should leave you cold with the poor taste of the sales pitch - and that one comes very close - but this is business reality. If you're the CIO and your boss asks whether your workforce could operate if nobody wanted to leave the front door, you need to have an answer based on risk analysis and practical necessity.

Another example would be hosted applications, such as those offered by Silicon Valley CRM upstarts NetSuite and Salesforce.com.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, said his company would never play the disaster card. Sure, his customers could log on and keep working in a different territory as long as there was an internet connection but it's a benefit he doesn't want to talk about.

He told silicon.com: "I think it would be seen as poor taste."

NetSuite on the other hand said it would mention it, though not make a virtue of it, citing a number of customers who had expressed relief that important customer, financial and sales data had survived Hurricane Katrina in one recent example.

And in truth such publicity, handled with care, is not in poor taste by today's standards.

Companies may not want to talk about something but that doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for it. And procurement, from the right people, for the right reasons, is part of responsible planning.

As businesses in the Bay Area will tell you, you cannot stop an earthquake, you can only prepare for it.