Delta Outage A Wake-Up Call for Insurers

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to tour a corporate disaster recovery (DR) center, right in the heart of center city Philadelphia. The facility, housed within a solidly built World War II-era tank factory, had every kind of system available, from IBM and Honeywell mainframes to rooms of PC servers. Here’s the way it worked: in the event of an outage caused by a natural or manmade disaster, clients’ IT managers would run down to the facility, backup tapes in hand, to reload and restore operations on the backup center’s systems. It was a process that was expected to last between 24 and 48 hours — there were even rooms with cots for the admins’ extended stay.