The bomb blast which took place outside the Marriott hotel on the 20th of September earlier this year shook the nation. It also shook the physical infrastructure of the Evacuee Trust Complex that housed 23 IT companies. It however, had no impact on the data that was running through the operations of the companies. Companies that lost their physical assets already had plans in place that allowed for businesses to continue.

Nayatel's (FTTU) Fiber-To-The-User infrastructure running across the capital city of Islamabad and the volunteer efforts of a lot of individuals and non-technology sector companies, most of the companies that had mission critical applications running were up within 48 hours. All of the companies that used to be in the ETC, were up and running within 5 days. No data or business was lost. Companies or websites operating on services managed by some of these companies experienced zero downtime.

And they achieved all this in Pakistan.

A facility in the US who went down after Hurricane Katrina took 10 days to come back up. LMKR, a Pakistani operation, came back up online in 2 days. That's even earlier than the prescribed international best practice for disaster recovery.

In the aftermath of the disaster, buildings in the areas close to the Marriott called upon the expertise of IT companies to better understand what they need to do in order to provide more robust facilities or even procedures as basic as evacuation plans, to their tenants. Formal agencies are once again running around to find people who can develop a comprehensive disaster management plan or policy without realizing one small, critical fact: you cannot plan for any management of anything overnight.