All the management efforts in the post blast time period took place on personal efforts. Wahaj Us Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel mobilized his engineers very quickly to assist the companies with anything they required. NUST opened its campus to house some of the call center operations and other parts of Islamabad did the same. The PSEB and PASHA got the IT companies some of the support needed, but everyone else who should have been creating that policy document, were already too late.

But there are a lot of critical lessons to be taken from the speed of the mobilization that companies were able to react with in this instance. Pakistan has all the isolated ingredients required to develop disaster management plans according to international best practices.

A passive infrastructure is already in place -- it just needs to be tweaked to be redundant and have processes in place which will enable it to be flexible to meet the urgent requirements of any business in any part of the country. You have various companies working on the fiber solution. With quick facilitation by the PTA and other agencies, this process can be hastened to perhaps empower private infrastructure providers to work closer with companies in the event of any unforeseen instance.

Companies need to have their backup facilities identified and ready to be able to manage the switch from their primary location to their secondary facility at no advance notice. Not a branch office. A DR site. The intensely populated large cities still have room to plan this deployment. Where the government can play a role is to help negotiate contract terms on behalf of the companies. Building requirements is an infrastructure issue that has to be resolved even for the existing IT parks. Take a look at the quality of the IT park in Karachi and you'll realize what this age-old argument is all about. Commercial buildings don't care to subsidize rates for commercial companies. After all, they too are running a business. If the government wishes to play its role, it needs to help with mobilization. Assist with the backup electricity. The electricity situation, which will hopefully get better over the next few months, will hamper what progress companies are able to make from any site, secondary or primary.

Have a plan in place. A consortium has to come together. A consortium of two kinds of stakeholders: those whose businesses are directly impacted by the lack of a national DR initiative, and those who have the ability to provide support facilities. So members of various private enterprise would comprise of the first set of people and representatives of universities with large campuses, network providers, companies that plan, develop and deploy infrastructure need to comprise the other. Because most of the IT-enabled projects running in the government are planned or managed by private consultants anyway, you need to have those representatives sitting on the consortium. But on the whole, for this initiative to see any kind of daylight, has to be industry driven.