The Disaster-Ready Desktop

Virtual Strategy magazine posted an interesting article today on how most companies are at financial risk due to a lack of disaster planning. It cites that organizations lose anywhere from $84,000 to $90,000 per hour of downtime in trying to get their servers back up and running.

The interesting part about disaster planning is that noone ever seems to plan for the disaster-ready desktop. Think about it: It's all well and wonderful if you have all your AD, servers, and services back up and running because of a DR plan, but what about the desktops that will connect to those servers?

There are a few possible situations most will plan for (and some of the relevant desktop considerations that should be taken):

• Server Failure (think single server) - If a failover server is utilized, desktops may need to be reconfigured to point to a new server. This can mean reconfiguring of drive mappings, printers, registry entries, INI file entries, Outlook profile settings, and more all in the name of a server name change. Having a solution that reconfigures every related aspect of the desktop to point to the alternate server(s) would save countless hours of manual reconfiguration and lack of productivity.
• WAN Failure - If a remote office cannot access their data center, IT can be inundated with calls regarding failing applications, errors when attempting to connect to a resource (even one as simple as a drive mapping or network printer), etc. Having a solution that removes the error-proned desktop elements (drives, printers, shortcuts, etc) along with message boxes on the desktop informing users of the outage and reconfiguration would save lower support calls, raise employee awareness and, assuming users can work on something during the outage instead of spending time calling IT, user productivity should be raised.
• Site Failure (power outage, natural disaster, chemical spill, etc) - All servers and desktops in the office would be unavailable, requiring a comprehensive failover site. The good news is this scenario has the best opportunity to be tested, as it should be self-sufficient once up and running. Having a solution that comprehensively deploys the desktop configuraiton meeting the business needs at the time of disaster is critical. It can be part original configuration, but it stands to reason (and experience) that not every system will work flawlessly and therefore some alternate configuraiton will be necessary to resume user productivity.

In all these cases, the desktop requires some amount of reconfiguration. A desktop management solution that closely meets the needs during a disaster cannot simply focus on deploying applications; it must focus on the whole desktop - apps, drives, printers, profiles, registry tweaks, security settings, etc. Anything IT needs to manipulate, the desktop management solution needs to deploy easily.