Sadly disasters happen, and when they do there are often valuable lessons to be learned. Unfortunately, poor IT infrastructure will limit the lessons the oil industry can learn from this incident.
The Deepwater Horizon rig was equipped with a vessel management system (VMS), which records dozens of different metrics about the conditions on the rig and in the well. These VMS logs would contain valuable details about the blowout, much like an airplane "black box" is essential in understanding a plane crash.
Steven Newman, the CEO of Transocean, said during a recent senate hearing, "There is some delay in the replication of our data, so our operational data, our sequence of events ends at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on the 20th. And so the VMS system, along with the logs of the VMS system, would have gone down with the vessel." The blowout and massive explosion happened at 10, taking eleven lives and seven hours of VMS data to the bottom of the ocean. Representative Bruce Braley from Iowa followed up with "So you have no mirrored backup data device so that that information is recorded at some other location than on the rig itself?". Newman replied, "We do not have real-time off-rig monitoring of what's going on on the vessel".
The costs to synchronize this data back to shore closer to "real-time" are nothing compared to the catastrophe at hand. If an IT Disaster Recovery risk analysis had been performed, this replication delay would have stood out like a sore thumb. We can be certain that new congressional regulations will be established to ensure that VMS data is replicated back to shore in a timely manner, but what about the rest of us? Now is a perfect time to take a look at your business and make sure that critical data is being backed up appropriately to an off-site location.
Comments
Indeed senior leadership in many organizations tolerate infosec controls - and then when it saves their rear ends they finally get it!!!