What is the biggest challenge of disaster recovery planning?
Larson: The basic principles and problems are the same as they were 30 years ago, but they’re much more complicated and you have fewer people to deal with them. We intend to double our premium [to $1 billion] and reduce our expenses [1% per year] by 2010. Companies don’t address disaster unless they have several million dollars to address it with. We don’t have a huge budget compared to some of the larger companies. Our IT staff is 175 — it’s not huge. So carving disaster recovery out of a smaller budget is really tough to do. How do you cover disaster recovery on a tight budget? Larson: We have added incrementally to our disaster recovery plan –facilities, staff and technology. We’re constantly in the process of assessing and reassessing. We find things that don’t work and we fix them before the next test. Success might mean we can do 80% of what we wanted to do and isolated the 20% we couldn’t. What kind of disaster recovery testing do you perform? Larson: We run two tests a year,
