Airline outages are all too common – we’ve documented the many issues major U.S. airlines have faced on this timeline.
When IT fails and airline workers can’t check in passengers or issue tickets, out come the pencils, pens and paper.
While they are, technically, a backup, it would be a stretch to call them a strategy. Using pencil and paper instead of computers breeds chaos, further delays, and frustration among both passengers and employees.
But sometimes a pencil is all an airline has ready when disaster strikes.
Their IT trouble might stem from mergers, which bring together two different environments that don’t necessarily work well together. It might be system updates built atop old hardware or software. It might be lack of testing the DR plan they do have.
While the cause of an outage isn’t always apparent, the solutions are. Production resilience. Tiered recovery. Frequent testing of DR plans to ensure they work when applications or hardware fails.
A truly effective DR plan recovers your most critical applications as quickly as possible to minimize delays, keep customers happy and banish all those pencils to a drawer.
