I appreciate how many responses include disaster recovery, risk mitigation, and business continuity. So many complaints have pointed the finger at Delta IT. While they are part of the problem, Delta Operations either had no plan or a plan that was insufficient with the replacement technology (calling Scheduling for example).

I assume a company as large as Delta has a whole disaster recovery department, if not several of them. From what I’ve read here and other forums, here are my thoughts on their failures:

• When planning, IT likely looked at the time to restore each standalone application, and did not consider the backlog each would have and the ability for its middleware to process this backlog between systems. I would chalk this up to lack of imagination by IT architects.
  
• Operations likely submitted a plan that said they would be “severely impacted” by a loss of these applications, and did not provide or was not provided a suitable backup that could keep operations running at 90% or better. Whoever in upper management signed off on this is responsible for not realizing what would happen without this operational process.