With lunch over, the team began showing off the PowerPoint presentation they had put together with a timeline for the migration of the first two data centers. It was going to happen on the following weekend. They kept pointing out the massive bandwidth connection which was set up just to do the final data migration. Margret’s own people had written the software that would do the extract of final data changes, then copy it across the network and load it onto the new system. The same software could be run in reverse if a back-out was needed. All in the room assured her it would not be necessary, but that it didn’t hurt to have a Plan B.

It was obvious to Margret she was being coddled to keep this golden cow putting out golden milk. She was outright pissed that the only guys provided her had been to an AIDS-infested area and she was certain none of them were smart enough to avoid catching it. Her summation of the girls in the room told her three of the five were too stupid to care. In short, this team would soon be moving on in one way or another.

Since Kathryn had chosen to treat her this way, like a napkin at McDonald’s instead of the full table setting at a nice place, she decided to drop a bomb on them and ruin their week. “This migration to offshore is all well and good, but you seem to have overlooked a serious recovery issue,” she said. All of the younglings leapt to inform her that the data centers were designed to split load and fail-over just like the existing centers. They also professed to having witnessed the fail-over testing themselves.

Kathryn finally chimed in saying she assured her they had tried to think of everything, but wanted to hear her concern so it could be addressed.

“Well,” started Margret, “Every night we do incremental backups and every morning, the prior night’s backups are sent to Iron Mountain for storage. The media return in such a manner that we have two full weeks of incremental backups. We also perform weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual backups. Each of those backups goes off to Iron Mountain as soon as it is completed. There is a set of rules in place so we have at least the last three sets of each off-site in secure storage. I don’t see anywhere in this plan where we have included the round trip shipping cost of backup media, nor the turnaround time it would take to have the media flown to India and do a full restoration in the event of a disaster.”

The only sound in the room was that of the ventilation system when Margret finished speaking. Margret looked Kathryn directly in the eye and waited for a response. She knew there wasn’t one, but wanted to see the tap dance. After waiting for a minute while Kathryn began looking through some documentation saying she was sure they had it covered and others sputtering assurances, Margret dropped her other bomb.

“In order to qualify for FDIC insurance, we cannot have a recovery period which is longer than twelve hours. The flight from the closest coast to India is over fourteen hours, and that doesn’t include restoration or testing time.”

Nothing like hitting someone with the two-by-four of a federal regulation right between the eyes after you’ve eaten their food, thought Margret.

Kathryn made a mental note to never offer Margret tainted nookie again when trying to coddle her. This girl didn’t play slow pitch or croquet, she was fast-pitch hardball all the way. The “barely old enough to shave” crowd was no help to her now. Time to cry uncle.

“I’m sure we addressed this issue at a high level, but now that the project is moving forward, perhaps we need to get into more detail and ensure there will be no problems going forward,” said Kathryn with a slight emphasis on “going forward.” If you are free this evening I would like to schedule a meeting with yourself and our Data Storage & Recovery Team.

Margret was pretty certain that “team” was going to be formed about five minutes after this meeting got over, but she responded saying that she would have to check her calendar once back in the office. They would not be able to get into too much detail without Margret bringing in her existing systems managers because they would have to sign off on any BRP (business recovery plan) put into place.

There was a special spring to Margret’s step when she left Big Four Consulting that day. She knew very well that she had no plans tonight other than staying late to get caught up on some paperwork. Had Kathryn bothered to do any of her own research when putting the plan together, she would have been able to shoot Margret out of the saddle. Yes, there was a rule claiming you couldn’t have outages and a catastrophic event had to be recovered from inside of twelve hours, but as long as your secondary data center could handle the full business load you had quite a bit of time to get your primary data center restored. Margret simply wanted the same four-star treatment upper management got.
 
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You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:


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