This summer many hospitality operators learned that disaster comes in many shapes and sizes. For most IT administrators, the arrival of the blaster worm produced familiar if still irksome results. Then came the blackout of 2004, which blanketed much of the northeastern United States and Ontario, Canada and turned vacation time into disaster recovery time for many IT administrators.

Yet, how many of us can say we were fully prepared for either of these disasters? True preparation comes with prompt recovery, rather than anticipating the myriad of potential disasters we may encounter.

The attack of the blaster worm--like so many viruses, worms and denial of service attacks that preceded it--came quickly and lasted perhaps a little longer than it should have. Exploiting vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system, the worm may end up costing up to $1 billion in overtime, system repair and related costs. Although Microsoft created a patch to protect against the security hole in July, most of the work was after the effect. The luckiest ones were ready well before with the patch in place.

Still, while the blaster worm may have shut down e-mail systems, crashed some websites, or caused some hair pulling among IT administrators, it had little obvious effect on guests eating in restaurants or visiting hotels. The blackout was another story. Thousands of hotels and restaurants were blacked out for more than 24 hours and the scene of hotel guests sleeping on the sidewalks of New York City will last for years.

The disaster recovery plans of hospitality operators proved to be scattered and haphazard at best. Many restaurants do not have back-up generators. Although I noticed a few pizza delivery companies doing a brisk business in blacked-out New Jersey, most restaurants closed shop and took a loss.

Hotels were not so lucky. Without the option of turning away guests (although not legally required to provide a room, I know of no hotels that closed up), hotels did their best to provide as much service as possible under the circumstances. Some distributed flashlights or glowsticks and offered rooms to stranded commuters. Other hotels, however, discovered that even back-up generators were not able to get water to the top floors or in a few cases open the doors to rooms.

Of course, power outages are not an uncommon occurrence - it was only the duration and geographic spread of this one that made it exceptional. Rather, blackouts and viruses/worms are a regular part of running a hotel or restaurant. Success and customer satisfaction comes from the ability to quickly and efficiently recover.

All this begs the question: Do you have a disaster recovery plan? As these events have made abundantly clear, this is a topic that bears greater scrutiny. Drop me a line at [email protected] and let us know how you handle disaster recovery and how these recent events affected your business.