December 8, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 16

Special Federal Executive Forum Issue on COOP/DISASTER RECOVERY Presented By

Continuity of Operations (COOP)/Disaster Recovery Transcript

LISTEN/WATCH VIDEO

Broadcast November 14, 2006 on WFED AM 1050 Washington, DC and www.FederalNewsRadio.com

 

Moderator

JIM FLYZIK, The Flyzik Group

Panelists

DAVID GARRATT, Deputy Director, Recovery Division, FEMA/DHS

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, Project Manager, Defense Communications and Army Switched Systems, U.S. Army

JERRY LOHFINK, Director, National Finance Center, U.S. Department of Agriculture

MAJOR GENERAL GUY C. SWAN III, Commanding General, Joint Force Headquarters, National Capital Region, Military District of Washington, U.S. Army

ALEC CHALMERS, Director of Solutions Sales, U.S. Public Sector, Symantec

JIM PREISSNER, Chief Technologist, ViON Corporation

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JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Welcome to this month’s show. During today’s show we will discuss critical issues facing government and industry leaders as they put in place disaster recovery plans for their critical programs. Let’s get right into the issues. I’d like to start off by having each panelist tell the audience about your involvement in disaster recovery planning from your perspective and about your role in that. Let’s start with Guy Swan. Major General, can you give us from your perspective your involvement with disaster recovery planning?

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

Yes, Jim. I’m the commander of an organization called the Joint Force Headquarters, National Capital Region. In simple terms, we are the military integrator for support to civil authorities here in the National Capital Region; whether it is homeland defense or disaster relief, your single point of contact for the military or DOD would be our headquarters. We are a subordinate headquarters to US Northern Command, which has overall homeland defense responsibility for the nation, and we work very closely with local, state, and federal authorities throughout the National Capital Region.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. We’ll come back and explore that state level coordination a little later in the show. Dave Garratt, over at FEMA, when we think about disaster recovery planning, we naturally think of FEMA playing a major role in that. Can you give us a sense of your perspective from where you sit? What is your role in overall disaster recovery planning?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

First as a point of clarification, we probably ought to define what recovery is. From our perspective it’s largely anything that takes place after that initial life sustaining, property protecting phase of a disaster. So from that perspective FEMA’s role, and FEMA is the federal agency responsible for coordinating the federal response to any disaster, within that context, the recovery division’s role is individual assistance, financial assistance, and housing assistance to individuals who have been impacted by the disaster; public assistance, which is providing financial assistance to communities that have been affected by a disaster to rebuild and restore their infrastructure. It also involves our debris removal component. We also are responsible for the long term community recovery emergency support function under the national response plan and we are responsible for coordinating and developing the plan that goes into the national response plan from every perspective. And I’d also like to add that on our plate, as a result of some recent legislation, we are now responsible for developing a national disaster recovery strategy and a national disaster housing plan.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Quite a complex set of assignments there and I’d like to explore that a little later and come back to some of the things that are going on at FEMA right now and some of the things that have happened over the past year. Alec Chalmers at Symantec, can you give us an industry point of view. Symantec for a long time has been seen as a company that’s been a major player in the security business, can you give us an idea of what your role is in disaster recovery planning?

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

Yes, today Jim, literally Symantec is involved with hundreds of public sector agencies from the state and local level to a federal level in assisting them to come up with IT architectural plans, business process review, as well as providing them sometimes, with our industry leading disaster recovery products. So we’ve taken a holistic view as we’ve go out and help public sector agencies come up with their plans and we’ve met with a lot of success in the market place.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Colonel Miller, with the Army, I know that you have a role in infrastructure planning and installation for the Army and what is your role in disaster recovery planning as you look to deploy that infrastructure and protect it?

 

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, U.S. ARMY

It’s a good question. We actually as you know have a wide variety of users as we support both the deployed fighter as well as the sustained base of the army. And one of the things that the army is doing to address those diverse needs is to look at doing army knowledge on line, which is to providing connectivity to dispersed users, if you will, as well as a concept called area processing centers, which is basically a consolidation activity but also will provide for a level of disaster recovery and COOP primarily for army but also for DOD users and certainly in support of national emergencies.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thank you. Jerry Lohfink, at the National Finance Center down in New Orleans, I’m sure you have some real interesting sets of issues to deal with and we’ll come back a little later and talk about Katrina and how you were able to keep the processing ongoing throughout that particular time period. But give us an idea, what is your role and how do you think through this down at the National Finance Center in New Orleans?

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

Thanks Jim. The purpose of the National Finance Center is to service 172 federal customer organizations. This is especially true during times of disaster or various issues such as that. So our job is to continue paying those 600,000 federal employees of our customer agencies and continuing to make sure that 2.4 million federal health benefit customers have a correct policy in place and can get the benefits they need. And to continue to provide the data center and operations support for USDA and other customer agencies that have crossed their mission critical applications list.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Thank you so much. We’ll come back and discuss some of those also. Jim Preissner, now at ViON, Jim you’ve seen this issue from both sides being at Social Security Administration and now in the private sector at ViON, a company that does a lot of work in this area. Can you give us an overview from your perspective?

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

Thank you Jim. Yes you are correct. My first perspective was as an executive at Social Security where disaster recovery planning was taken very seriously and reassessed in the early 2000s, and efforts are underway now to bring those plans up to speed with the increasing activity, and the fact that everything’s gone on line.

 

But here at ViON, after I retired I joined ViON in 2005, I’ve been able to consult with a number of the different marketing reps in various state, local and federal agencies regarding how to get this kicked off. Some are lacking the essential ingredient, one essential ingredient, a second facility. So whether it’s trying to find a facility for them or whether it’s perhaps their needs are small enough so that we can guide

them in the direction of a service provider that could stand up their disaster operation, we are in there quite heavily.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. It’s always good to have that institutional knowledge of the government programs. I’ve been out of government now for about three years and I still think I’m in. It’s hard for me to believe that I’m not, as I tend to view everything from the point of view of the government employee or program manager. Let’s explore, I want to delve a little bit further into this, despite national crises such as Katrina and the terrorist attacks, it still seems like we struggle to get the resources and the level of commitment from the top executives on these kinds of programs. I believe as early as today in one of the local trade journals about there’s still a need to do a lot more and get a lot more resources in this area. I wondered if the panelists could share their perspective on this and let’s start with Colonel Miller. Colonel, how would you react to that question of are we getting the proper high level of attention on these matters and the resources that we need, or do we need to keep pushing to get there?

 

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, U.S. ARMY

I certainly believe that we need to continue to keep pushing as I’m not sure that we can get to where we want to be without doing that, but certainly I also believe that there has been a level of resource commitment and intellectual commitment within both the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense to get to some of the DR and COOP capabilities that we are looking for as we have to deal with any emergency that might apply to a service specific or DOD emergency as well as again support to any national event. I see it as being the proper level of commitment at this point.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

David at FEMA, I know we’ve seen some reorganizations and the DHS appropriations too which appear to be putting higher priorities on FEMA and appear to be ramping up FEMA and getting that report in certain circumstances to the president and so forth. Could you speak to the issue a little bit about are you seeing a lot of change and more attention in this area as we move forward?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

We are certainly seeing a lot of additional attention since hurricane Katrina and obviously that galvanized the country in a number of ways. So in that respect, that attention is good. We obviously want as much support for the recovery mission as we can possibly get. Keep in mind that I do recovery for, that is my business, so we are always focused on recovery in the recovery division within FEMA and we feel like over time that we have received certainly an adequate amount of support from our leadership in FEMA, DHS, and the executive level. But regardless of what we do in the recovery arena, there are always going to be some major challenges facing us, so our goal over time is to incrementally improve our capability to respond to a challenge the scale and magnitude of hurricane Katrina.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. Jerry Lohfink, how about over at the Nation Finance Center, are you able to get this issue and the kind of resources you need to put in place the plans you need to get in place?

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

Well, Jim, we’ve been very, very fortunate. The National Finance Center reports through the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. My immediate supervisor who is Pat Healey who is the Deputy Chief Financial Officer has always understood the importance and the need to make sure the continuity is as well funded and supported as regular business. And that goes all the way up through the Secretary, who is a great believer that it is just another part of doing our business each day, regardless of whether it’s the National Finance Center or another part Agriculture.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Major General Swan, can I ask you to speak to that issue and the criticism we hear and the points we hear made all the time, that the government still and senior people still are not making this a high enough priority. How would you react to that comment?

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

Well Jim I would say from a regional perspective, here in the greater Washington area, from a Department of Defense standpoint the establishment of our command in 2003 I think was a commitment to support local and state first responders and other agencies in continuity of operations disaster relief. Before 2003, in fact before 2001, before 9/11, the military service commands in the Washington area were a disparate group having stove pipe functions and in 2003 we pulled all of those together under our command and now we can function more synergistically with other agencies. That’s also true above me, at the US Northern Command level, the four star command, that was established after 9/11, so I think that in the Department of Defense we are taking this entire mission a lot more seriously.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s great news. It’s just great hearing that we are getting this group together. I have this theory that if you can just get people around the table and to get to know one another and shake hands or whatever, then when you need them in a time of crisis, it’s a lot easier to pick up that telephone or to send that email or whatever to get involved. I also want to hear from our two private sector panelists on this same matter but we need to take a short break first:

Break

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Jim, let’s start with you on that same question. When we think of the private sector CEOs when we look at their agenda, it’s stock holders equity, it’s generating revenue, it’s cutting cost. Now we have disaster recovery planning. Are we getting that issue at the board of directors meetings and so forth. Is it a priority from your perspective in the private sector?

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

Jim, 9/11 and Katrina were wake up calls and that has rippled through our industry and government across the board, the scope and intensity of disaster recovery planning is at an all time high. But I think what you are going to find at any agency where they are advanced in the DR planning is that either a business executive or systems executive has stepped out and is championing the cause. Sometimes that is hard to do. It means exposing at least internally potential weaknesses in where they are today in their disaster recovery capability. That’s what I think is going on.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Alec, how about over at Symantec?

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

Yes, I think we are definitely seeing progress being made. I think couple of years ago people looked at COOP initiatives and DR as more or less an insurance policy. And nobody wants to pay the insurance bill, but you know you have to. I think you need to move beyond that, you have to move beyond a COOP initiative purely as disaster recovery. You have to look at it as a business process change, as a review of business processes, and if I could just follow up on Jim’s comment, there it’s really linking those business processes, operational line of business owners, through that initiative and then I think you will continue to see the funding increase.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. I’d like to switch a bit and talk about what do you see our major challenges coming through this stuff? Are they technical in nature or more business? Is it justifying the return on investment? David Garratt, when you talked about your role and all the complexities and when you think about a disaster recovery plan or a COOP plan, whatever, essentially you think about mobilizing the entire organization.

 

It is a tremendously complex challenge. What do you think are some of the toughest challenges that you meet everyday, David, the ones that you need to overcome to move forward?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

Well, from a federal, state, local perspective, I would say that there are four challenges. One is obviously cost, as we identify gaps in capability and move to remedy those gaps, that’s going to cost money and we need to have the fortitude to commit the funding necessary to do what is necessary to meet what may be in a lot of respects an abstract concern. Time is a factor, it requires a lot of time to plan for

something as you indicated as complex as a catastrophic disaster, particularly if that catastrophic disaster is one that has a lot of complex cascading dimensions to it.

We’re talking nuclear weapons detonations, one or more, that are something that the country has never faced before but it is certainly something that we can plan against. It is extremely difficult to pigeon hole an event of that nature.

 

There are so many complex aspects to that, that it is difficult for the average local jurisdiction to handle it. And finally I would say that unifying all of the interrelated players that would need to contribute to that planning process. At a local level, a city may want to do some planning but they’ve also got to coordinate with the surrounding jurisdictions and coordinate with the state and coordinate with the federal agencies as well as the private sector and volunteer agencies that participate in it.

 

So that is an awful lot of individuals and organizations to rope into the planning effort and who are committed to do it. So definitely face some challenges in that regard.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Major General Swan? Challenges, what do you think are the toughest challenges in moving forward?

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

I’d like to follow up on what Dave said, I think what we are talking about here is creating a culture of resilience in our communities and the business communities, local, state and federals, that’s what we are trying to do is create a unity of effort in this business.

 

Technical challenges can be overcome, it’s those cultural issues the cooperation that is required. I think here in the National Capital Region that seems to have happened, because of 9/11, because of the sniper incident and other challenges that we have in this region, so I am optimistic that we can overcome some of these technical challenges.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

It’s amazing, this is our eleventh show that we are doing here and no matter what the topic is we talk about, there is always optimism of being able to meet the technical challenge and the real difficult things are the culture and coordination and so forth.

 

Colonel Miller would you agree with that? That the technical issues perhaps are not the major challenges and from your view point, what are some of the major challenges that need to be overcome for you to move forward?

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

Well I absolutely agree with you that the technology is not the issue here, that it is really the integration piece of this. Certainly in our domain as we talk about what truly is a heterogeneous environment, we certainly have, and General Swan mentioned it already, a lot of stove pipes that even exist today of course.

 

And bringing that into a homogeneous environment presents its own cultural problems and so that’s certainly what we see as the issues basically getting everybody on board and having an enterprise approach to COOP and DR and business continuity rather than a stove pipe approach.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Getting everybody around the table to agree on what the software package is for word processing is easier said than done. Everybody has their favorites and wants to keep that. Jerry Lohfink, challenges from your perspective? Down at New Orleans, I’m sure you have some unique things that you deal with on a day to day basis.

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

We do. But once again I have to agree with what the previous panelist said, it’s not the technology issue. It really is integration into your building process; it’s building in resiliency an understanding collaboration and at the edges, the communication points that are necessary to continue the success.

 

None of us are in this together. I think as a federal government we’ve made tremendous strides in terms of looking internally and building very effective plans. The next thing is to look out and get those integration points and key partners and make sure that we’ve got this thing handled from an enterprise perspective as Colonel Miller stated.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Alec, from the private sector a little different, what do you see as some of the challenges you have say in supporting government agencies or supporting companies that are trying to get disaster recovery plans in place?

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

If I could just follow up on the other comments made, we have looked at three major issues: people, processes, I think lastly are technology and like everyone has said we don’t really think it’s a technology issue. So if you look at people, you have to link those key executives in those lines of businesses who run those agencies to the initiative. It can’t be an IT only initiative.

 

You have to link those two people together and I think that process, process is key and if you see a break down. If you only have folks in the IT part of it, your systems may be up and running but the ability to cut checks to federal workers may be totally left behind, so you have to leverage those processes and make sure you study those.

 

And lastly, technology, cost is really not an issue, I think you have to look at leveraging what you already have it’s not a replace kind of scenario, you have to leverage the investments that you’ve already made, you have to make those investments in IT better and more resilient and then finally just leveraging the technology will allow you to do that.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific Alec thanks. Jim Preissner, how about over at ViON what are some of the unique challenges that you have every day trying to forward these issues?

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

I want to follow up on the comment that technology is not expensive. It’s not individually, but when you set up a major data center and you’re talking about millions of dollars that’s in competition with launching new applications. These are the types of issues, business issues that still have to be wrestled to the ground by agency heads in order to then allocate the funding and get the DR planning program and the implementation program rolling.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. I’d like to shift attention slightly again and talk about some of the good things that have happened in terms of disaster recovery during Katrina I know the National Finance Center was right in the path of a hurricane but yet continued to process and

I know that although the press dwells on the problematic aspects of some of the things that happened in FEMA I know I’ve heard from FEMA many wonderful stories of things that actually worked well.

 

And at DOD, the same holds true, a lot of the heroic aspects of disaster recovery. Let’s talk here, let’s get started and carry through the next break a conversation around disaster recovery programs that worked and why they worked. Jerry, why don’t we start with you down at the National Finance Center since you were in the eye of the storm so to speak.

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

Unfortunately we were in the eye of the storm. But we were very fortunate. We’ve got some excellent people who are very knowledgeable and very dedicated and they’ve spent years refining, examining, and honing processes to make sure that we could continue regardless of the scenario.

 

So it’s really people planning, practicing the plans. We learned more from practice failures than we do from planning exercises, so it’s a great experience to go through. And then I think the most important thing is that you’ve got to take care of people. It’s the people who got you there. It’s the people who designed the processes, designed the plan, who run the practices. If you don’t take care of those people during the actual event then you’ve done it all for nothing.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. I like that focus on people, that’s so important. I guess when the people know that the focus is the people it motivates them all that much more to do the job.

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

Basically all you have got to do is get out of the way after that and they will bring it home.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I like that. David Garratt, as I mentioned, the press likes to talk about all the bad things that happen and conversations at the last IT meeting I chaired, we had someone from FEMA there who told a lot of very heroic stories. How about some disaster recovery processes that worked?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

I can talk about one of those; an area that has received a lot of attention is our manufactured housing program. In response to hurricane Katrina we probably provided 10 times the number of manufactured housing units than we’ve ever provided in any previous disaster, approaching 130,000.

 

We started rolling those manufactured housing units within weeks of Hurricane Katrina and the reason that they’ve been particularly effective for us, even though we’ll be the first to admit that a travel trailer is not an ideal living environment for anybody for an extended period of time, but for an individual whose home has been destroyed, and who wants to remain on his or her property and rebuild that home, and wants to get started right away, there is no better way, in fact there is no other way of providing that individual a stable, if not with a perfect living environment, to get started on that. And again, that program I think even though it has received a fair amount of scrutiny, in a number of quarters has nevertheless been very effective in helping to spur what is going to be the long recovery in the Gulf Coast area.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. Let’s hear from one of our private sector guests before we break on that. Jim Preissner gives me some examples of a disaster recovery program that works or is in place to work or has worked.

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

Well, luckily the example I’m going to give hasn’t had to stand the test of an actual disaster yet. But several years ago, Justice (??) stood up a consolidation program and consolidated five main frame centers into two and then mirrored the data and program assets between those two with the hot (??) standby equipment that they have they are able to do extensive testing of applications. They’ve run once out of the country (??) they can test it at the other data center and most recently I’m aware of an initiative to actually move a production application from one center to another for about a month. I heard the word practice over here from the General, and that’s right on the mark. Unless you practice it, you won’t know and you can do all the drills you want and certainly the checkouts that occur sort of off line are valuable to expose a missing license or but actually the ability to move production

applications from one center to another basically transparently, run it for a week or two weeks or a month and then move it back, that is real insurance and assurance that your program is in good shape.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, we’ve heard that testing come up quite a bit here and I remember from my days running Secret Service communications, I did that for a few years, we did a lot of testing. Sometimes we tested without even knowing it was a test, which makes it even more interesting. It’s like the fire drill. If you know the fire drill’s going to be at one o’clock then everybody has a lot to do but if you don’t know it sets up a lot of new questions and you learn a lot. We want to hear from our other panelists too but we need to take a short break

 

Break

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

We were talking about actual disaster recovery plans that worked that have been tested in place. And I’d like to hear from the panelists that we didn’t have a chance to hear from on that subject. Colonel Miller from your perspective, plans that in your mind either worked or are in place and tested to work.

 

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, U.S. ARMY

Well, what I wanted to expand on is what Jerry mentioned earlier and that’s one of the things that we see in our business, the acquisition business, is the people aspect and how they make a contribution to disaster recovery and these kinds of developments. Certainly one of the things that happened during Katrina or 9/11 for that matter is that as additional communications connectivity and providing those types of lifelines that don’t exist or are taken away during a disaster, the acquisition community at Fort Monmouth in particular have stepped up to the plate, and this is true elsewhere as well, but to provide that type of connectivity with diversion of resources and an opportunity to really give people some type of capability that they would not otherwise have or would not have for quite some time. The other thing I see is people literally volunteering to go into those situations immediately, just like we have several acquisitions professionals serving in South West Asia in the field of operations there, they all want to go to these disasters and immediately volunteer to do so. I find that to be pretty impressive.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I think that trend has been very positive, seeing how in a lot of cases since Katrina and so forth DOD and civilian agencies working a lot closer with the private sector and the need to coordinate things. Major General Swan, from your perspective, gives us some things that you think are working.

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

Yes Jim, much is made of Katrina and certainly our command has learnt a lot of lessons that we are applying today. Here in the National Capital Region we have

some advantages that maybe other sectors of the country don’t have and those are the national special security events whether it’s the state of the union, the inauguration, a state funeral, these operations become large planning and coordination events literally across hundreds of jurisdictions and agencies and we get to practice those things several times a year for a lot of those major special events.

So this notion of getting to know the players before an incident occurs is going on here in the greater Washington area several times a year. So I can speak from my own personal experience that I do get out and meet the chiefs of police, the fire chiefs, the state emergency managers, the DHS officials and those people will not be unknown to me or me to them in the case of a crisis. So we are making some good progress using those preplanned events that go on throughout the year.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

It’s true the DC area has a lot of events that require a tremendous amount of planning activity. Alec from the Symantec view point, have you seen programs that are in place that you think….

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

Yes, certainly, we see examples all the time in the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies. Unfortunately we can’t really speak publicly about them but I think it’s important here to capture the small way we talk a lot about planning.

There are cases every day where we have to put these plans into effect. It could be someone tripping over a cord in the data center and a major system going down. How can we be sure that system fails naturally so I think as we go out and look at technologies, you want to look for solution providers and to provide the ability to run a fire drill of sorts.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. I think Major General Swan you brought up talking to state and local and talking to DHS officials which brings the point too, when you look at disaster recovery planning, from your perspective, your agency, that’s one set of issues, but when you quickly realize, when you look at supply chains and you look at all the various entities that you need to operate with, communicate with, or work with, you quickly realize that if somewhere along the way if there are failures in any of those processes then it will impact your ability to respond and so forth. So how about that coordination with other entities and the private sector and the supply chain? Can we start with you Major Swan?

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

I whole heartedly agree with your comment Jim that in the business of disaster relief and disaster recovery you cannot from an agency standpoint look at the issue without looking beyond your own organization. We certainly do that here in the National Capital Region.

 

I spend a lot of time with state and local officials as I mentioned because more often than not the military will be in support of those federal or state civil agencies whether it’s David at FEMA, or at the county level, we will be in support of other civil agencies. So thinking outside of my own organization is a requirement in this business and I would venture to guess that’s true even in the private sector and in the non governmental sector as well.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

David at FEMA, I would think that you would have a tremendous amount of activity that would involve working with other entities and state and local and you mentioned earlier about that trailers, I imagine that there’s a whole logistics thing that falls in place. Can you talk a little bit about that need to reach out and coordinate with all these entities?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

Certainly. Obviously developing a document as comprehensive as the National Response Plan requires that we bring the stakeholders from all sectors of the government and the private sector together to help us pull that document together and craft a consolidated plan that we can all get behind. I want to follow up on something that both these gentlemen were talking about and that is the need to bring everybody together.

Clearly our ability to respond and recover from a disaster is going to result from how well we rope in all the stakeholders in advance of that disaster, and effectively have them at the table to respond to that disaster. The ability to plan effectively means that we need the stakeholders, all of them, the private sector, volunteer agencies, government, across the board, working together in advance, plot out what their requirements are, what they are going to contribute to a disaster response scenario and all of them work together in a real way to make that happen.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific. Alec, from Symantec’s viewpoint, I imagine as a company you too need to look across, we are in the world of just in time everything, which means you are depending on others in order to meet your mission. Can you comment on that?

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

Well, I think this is really the key point where you look at breaking away COOP from just being an IT initiative to again getting your proper business executive’s line with your process. So state and local agencies intersecting with the federal government this is the point where you need to look at the business process and see where the federal process intersects with that state and local agencies’ process. And you can’t do that by yourself if you are just a director of IT out there; you have to be in line with your key business partner to make sure that happens.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, there’s always the debate about that fine line about how much do you work internal and how much time do you spend outside and you have to balance that out in order to make sure that you provide the proper balance there. Jerry Lohfink, talking about coordination with state and local from your perspective.

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

And what I’d like to just mention is the lessons learned from Katrina. One of the things that we immediately realized is that in a disaster zone you are on an island. But the other thing is that you are not on that island alone. You’ve got federal partners, state, and local also private sector folks.

So one of the things that the New Orleans federal executive board has been really focusing on in the last 6 – 8 months has been managing a definition of expectations for each role player, is understanding how we bring, what each person brings to the table in terms of resources, and then a mechanism to coordinate across those organizations to match supply and demand during the critical juncture. And it’s really one of the more exciting things that we’ve been involved in the whole time.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, that’s great. Colonel Miller, coordination with state and local entities in order to get your mission accomplished. Can you talk a little about that?

 

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, U.S. ARMY

Yes, it’s not dramatic I would say within the acquisition community as much as it is with our industry partners and making sure that we are aligned in the kinds of capabilities that are necessary to enhance support to federal and state government. So I would say that the bottom line is although that is occurring and certainly from a policy perspective it occurs within DOD, on the acquisitions side it’s more in terms of making sure that the capability exists to support those activities.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Jim Preissner at ViON, I know with so much attention in this area focused on the idea that disasters start local, do you see companies changing at all in terms of how they view putting these comprehensive solutions in place recognizing that it’s going to start with a local event and then move out to become state and local entities?

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

I don’t see the coordination that I think could be there in terms of federal, state, and local entities getting together and industry sitting down and figuring out where to place some of the larger shared DR sites. I think that type of coordination has started and done noticeably well in the first responder part of the disaster but the cleanup and the ongoing operation is something that I think is a gap right now.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Yes, I agree with that. I think that since actually getting out of government there’s still a lot of industry federal practice and state practice and local practice. And I think with so much emphasis on first responders there seems to be a lot of movement towards pulling that stuff together and companies began looking a little differently at government versus state and local government, government in general. I think that I did have the opportunity to participate on a number of posts Katrina reviews, one up at MIT which was fascinating and what I walked away from there, was that there was never a question of the will of the people and everybody that really wanted to help.

 

There were issues in the way, it was around process and policy and who was in charge and continuity of operations and those kinds of things, but I think based on what we are hearing here this morning is that a lot of these issues are being addressed and we are making a lot of progress there. And we are going to come back with our final question which I will pose to each of our panelists, about are we ready for a disaster whatever shape or form it may take in the future.

Break.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

For our last segment here, I’m going to poll each of our panelists and I’m going to ask the question are we resilient and prepared for a future disaster, whether it comes from nature, terrorism or some type of pandemic outbreak. Let’s go down the table here and start with Jim Preissner the chief technologist at ViON. Jim, are we ready?

 

JIM PREISSNER, VION CORPORATION

I’m not sure that we can ever say that we can be ready for everything that is presented to us. But if agencies and industry practice sound data protection and data recovery practices, if they have the infrastructure issue either solved or certainly an executable plan, then you are at least 75% of the way there and the gap is something that, as Jerry mentioned, is give the people the challenge and then stand back.

Because in my experience in helping Jerry stand up the new data center in a completely empty conditioned floor space was built out in four weeks and that included ordering and tracking the delivery and bringing it all together and there was a brand new data center up and running in support of USDA and the National Finance Center. The people will work wonders given the challenge to do that.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

That’s great, I love that comment. Jerry, is the National Finance Center ready?

 

JERRY LOHFINK, NATIONAL FINANCE CENTER, AGRICULTURE

Oh I believe we are ready. But the thing that does keep me up at night is pandemic. Because pandemic hits at the core of our greatest resource, our people. We’ve mentioned so much about the importance of our key people today. So the real challenge with pandemic now is to begin looking more outside of our individual organizations, greater collaboration, greater understanding of our business partners and what they can bring to the table. So that we really have a much greater holistic view of the resources available to continue the central services and continuity.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I think you are right too, the pandemic. We don’t have time today but the pandemic brings up a whole new set of issues because of that people issue. I don’t know if getting people where they need to be and we have had a radio show in the past on emergency communications and we talked a lot about communications under a pandemic environment being completely different from some of those other things. Colonel Miller from your perspective, do you think we’ve made progress to the point that we are ready today to face any type of event?

 

COLONEL SCOT MILLER, U.S. ARMY

Well, Jim we don’t have a crystal ball and as you mentioned earlier are we ready for every possible contingency and I guess the answer is we don’t know what we don’t know sometimes. But it certainly seems from my perspective that we are getting better, that we have made a commitment to resource and develop the capabilities necessary to build the infrastructure that is required to support DR and with the greater knowledge of those technologies and those processes, I believe that we are certainly poised to handle most anything that comes our way.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Great. Alec, from Symantec, do you believe that we are in a position today, we’ve made progress and do you feel confident to face any challenge?

 

ALEC CHALMERS, SYMANTEC

I do, and I feel that we are making progress and I’ve talked a lot about people, process, and technology. We have a panel here that can address the people and process part. As far as technology and industry is concerned I think that when you look at data protection and application failure, that of course is an important piece of it but that’s only half of the problem Because now you bring up the pandemic issue, you have people working from home, I think one of your earlier episodes was about teleworking.

 

So now all of a sudden you have thousands of people accessing your systems from different remote locations, and so now you really come into an issue of security compliance. So now you have new devices touching your network that perhaps haven’t gone through the same level of scrutiny as they have inside your data center. So I think it is always going to be an evolving issue so I think you need to

look at choosing your solution providers that can go out and really address the whole gamut of issues.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Thanks Alec. David Garratt, the Deputy Director of Recovery Division at FEMA/DHS. I’m sure FEMA, this is a major priority for you and I’m sure that you’ve done a tremendous amount of planning. How confident do you feel in terms of being ready to face disaster in the future?

 

DAVE GARRATT, FEMA/DHS

Well, I’m tremendously confident from the federal perspective that we are ready to quickly and immediately respond to and recover from or apply our assets and capabilities to help respond to and recover from a disaster or an incident. That said, even though we are working very closely with our partners we have a great relationship with and can apply a lot of resources and capabilities to a disaster, that does not mean that we can not continue to improve on those capabilities. We are in a position to respond and recover even better in the future and we are making progress on that every day.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

Terrific and we are with you on that one. Major General Swan, we’ve got a few minutes left yet if you’d like to give us your perspective on the readiness of the country to respond to a disaster in the future.

 

MAJOR GENERAL GUY SWAN, U.S. ARMY

Well, Jim, as was mentioned by another of the panelists, we can never truly predict what the catastrophe may be, whether that’s terrorism, a man made disaster or some other medical emergency like pandemic flu. We can’t control those things. What we can control are things like coordination, cooperation, testing, exercising, and I will tell you that is going on not just in the National Capital Region but throughout the country. Here in the NCR we have the best first responders in the world, in my view. We have first class national guard troops; we have a lot of resources available to us. The problem will not be enough resources; it will be the coordination, the synchronization of all of those assets. That still needs to be worked and that is being worked every day. But like my colleagues here I am very confident that we know where we are going, we know what needs to be done and we are going to be ready the next time a catastrophe occurs.

 

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP

I appreciate that a lot. I guess I will make a last comment or two here. I think from the basis of the shows that we’ve seen and the panelists we’ve had that it’s probably not practical to think that you can cover 100% of every contingency that one can think of. What we have learned from terrorism is that we need to begin to think the unthinkable. Things that we’ve never even dreamed of in the past have happened. To believe that we can put up a wall, people can go under a wall, you can put up a fence and locks and people will find some other way around that, it’s sort