acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Melissa Schigoda

Organisations play a vital role in assisting communities to recover from disasters. They are the key providers of goods and services needed in both response and recovery efforts. They provide the employment which both anchors people to place and supports the taxation base to allow for necessary recovery spending. Finally, organisations are an integral part of much day to day functioning contributing immensely to people’s sense of ‘normality’ and psychological wellbeing. Yet, despite their overall importance in the recovery process, there are significant gaps in our existing knowledge with regard to how organisations respond and recover following disaster. This research fills one part of this gap by examining collaboration as an adaptive strategy enacted by organisations in the Canterbury region of New Zealand, which was heavily impacted by a series of major earthquakes, occurring in 2010 and 2011. Collaboration has been extensively investigated in a variety of settings and from numerous disciplinary perspectives. However, there are few studies that investigate the role of collaborative approaches to support post-disaster business recovery. This study investigates the type of collaborations that have occurred and how they evolved as organisations reacted to the resource and environmental change caused by the disaster. Using data collected through semi-structured interviews, survey and document analysis, a rich and detailed picture of the recovery journey is created for 26 Canterbury organisations including 14 collaborators, six non-traders, five continued traders and one new business. Collaborations included two or more individual businesses collaborating along with two multi-party, place based projects. Comparative analysis of the organisations’ experiences enabled the assessment of decisions, processes and outcomes of collaboration, as well as insight into the overall process of business recovery. This research adopted a primarily inductive, qualitative approach, drawing from both grounded theory and case study methodologies in order to generate theory from this rich and contextually situated data. Important findings include the importance of creating an enabling context which allows organisations to lead their own recovery, the creation of a framework for effective post-disaster collaboration and the importance of considering both economic and other outcomes. Collaboration is found to be an effective strategy enabling resumption of trade at a time when there seemed few other options available. While solving this need, many collaborators have discovered significant and unexpected benefits not just in terms of long term strategy but also with regard to wellbeing. Economic outcomes were less clear-cut. However, with approximately 70% of the Central Business District demolished and rebuilding only gaining momentum in late 2014, many organisations are still in a transition stage moving towards a new ‘normal’.

This study followed two similarly affected, but socio-economically disparate suburbs as residents responded to and attempted to recover from the devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, 2011. More specifically, it focuses on the role of local churches, community-based organisations (CBOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), here referred to broadly as civil society, in meeting the immediate needs of local residents and assisting with the longer-term recovery of each neighbourhood. Despite considerable socioeconomic differences between the two neighbourhoods, civil society in both suburbs has been vital in addressing the needs of locals in the short and long term following the earthquake. Institutions were able to utilise local knowledge of both residents and the extent of damage in the area to a) provide a swifter local response than government or civil defence and then help direct the relief these agencies provided locally; b) set up central points for distribution of supplies and information where locals would naturally gather; c) take action on what were perceived to be unmet needs; and d) act as a way of bridging locals to a variety of material, informational, and emotional resources. However the findings also support literature which indicates that other factors are also important in understanding neighbourhood recovery and the role of civil society, including: local leadership; a shared, place-based identity; the type and form of civil society organizations; social capital; and neighbourhood- and household-level indicators of relative vulnerability and inequality. The intertwining of these various factors seems to influence how these neighbourhoods have coped with and taken steps in recovering from this disaster. It is recommended that future research be directed at developing a better understanding of how this occurs. It is suggested that a model similar to Yasui’s (2007) Community Vulnerability and Capacity model be developed as a useful way to approach future research in this area.

Cloud infrastructure services are enabling organizations and enterprises to outsource a wide range of computing, storage, and networking needs to external service providers. These offerings make extensive use of underlying network virtualization, i.e., virtual network (VN) embedding, techniques to provision and interconnect customized storage/computing resource pools across large network substrates. However, as cloud-based services continue to gain traction, there is a growing need to address a range of resiliency concerns, particularly with regards to large-scale outages. These conditions can be triggered by events such as natural disasters, malicious man-made attacks, and even cascading power failures. Overall, a wide range of studies have looked at network virtualization survivability, with most efforts focusing on pre-fault protection strategies to set aside backup datacenter and network bandwidth resources. These contributions include single node/link failure schemes as well as recent studies on correlated multi-failure \disaster" recovery schemes. However, pre-fault provisioning is very resource-intensive and imposes high costs for clients. Moreover this approach cannot guarantee recovery under generalized multi-failure conditions. Although post-fault restoration (remapping) schemes have also been studied, the effectiveness of these methods is constrained by the scale of infrastructure damage. As a result there is a pressing need to investigate longer-term post-fault infrastructure repair strategies to minimize VN service disruption. However this is a largely unexplored area and requires specialized consideration as damaged infrastructures will likely be repaired in a time-staged, incremental manner, i.e., progressive recovery. Furthermore, more specialized multicast VN (MVN) services are also being used to support a range of content distribution and real-time streaming needs over cloud-based infrastructures. In general, these one-to-many services impose more challenging requirements in terms of geographic coverage, delay, delay variation, and reliability. Now some recent studies have looked at MVN embedding and survivability design. In particular, the latter contributions cover both pre-fault protection and post-fault restoration methods, and also include some multi-failure recovery techniques. Nevertheless, there are no known efforts that incorporate risk vulnerabilities into the MVN embedding process. Indeed, there is a strong need to develop such methods in order to reduce the impact of large-scale outages, and this remains an open topic area. In light of the above, this dissertation develops some novel solutions to further improve the resiliency of the network virtualization services in the presence of large outages. Foremost, new multi-stage (progressive) infrastructure repair strategies are proposed to improve the post-fault recovery of VN services. These contributions include advanced simulated annealing metaheuristics as well as more scalable polynomial-time heuristic algorithms. Furthermore, enhanced \risk-aware" mapping solutions are also developed to achieve more reliable multicast (MVN) embedding, providing a further basis to develop more specialized repair strategies in the future. The performance of these various solutions is also evaluated extensively using custom-developed simulation models.

Business continuity plans (BCP) help organizations plan for and withstand the occurrence of unexpected events that interrupt the normal operation of business. Managers typically develop several alternate plans to minimize the business impact of unexpected events. The problem for decision makers is that comparative evaluation of BCP is typically done using subjective judgments. This research uses a case study approach focusing on a single organization and a single business continuity application to propose the use of computer simulation as a tool for managers to identify and evaluate different BCP prior to committing resources. In the context of an insurance firm, a specific plan was evaluated using simulation methods. A simulation model was used to model the operational aspects of the call center in an insurance company. After the model was validated, it was used to answer questions about what-if scenarios. Results suggest that scenario analysis using simulated model enables managers to ask useful questions that can help evaluate the plan. Managers at the insurance company used the simulation model to determine the level of service required and evaluate business continuity strategies to achieve it.

The suddenness and scale of the 26 December 2004 tsunami and the challenges posed to affected communities highlighted the benefits of their members having a capacity to confront and adapt to the consequences of such a disaster. 2 Research into adaptive capacity or resilience has been conducted almost exclusively with Western populations. This paper describes an exploratory study of the potential of a measure of collective efficacy developed for Western populations to predict the capacity of members of a collective society, Thai citizens affected by the 2004 tsunami, to confront effectively the recovery demands associated with this disaster. Following a demonstration that this measure could predict adaptive capacity, the role of religious affiliation, ethnicity and place of residence in sustaining collective efficacy is discussed. The implications of the findings for future research on, and intervention to develop, adaptive capacity among Thai citizens in particular and collectivist societies in general are discussed.

People who live in mobile homes have heightened vulnerability to disasters, due in part to mobile homes increasingly occupying high-hazard risk lands and the precarious ownership status known as divided-tenure. Divided-tenure is when an individual owns a mobile home and rents the land underneath. To identify the challenges associated with divided-tenure and disaster recovery from a policy perspective, this study analyzed the content of key HUD policies and performed a comparative policy analysis of purchase opportunity laws (requirements of landowners to give mobile homeowners an opportunity to purchase the property their home resides on) in three states: California, Florida, and New York. Content analysis indicated few direct references to mobile homes. Inconsistencies and confusing messaging were found in the existing federal guidance. The lack of consistent terminology and guidance on addressing divided-tenure, limits mobile homeowner's options for disaster recovery, including eligibility for federal disaster aid and potentially participation in relocation or buyout programs. The three selected states' purchase opportunity laws reviewed in this study were rated as weak. Policies lacked alignment with federal documents and opportunities for mobile homeowners were difficult to navigate. A pathway to land ownership could give mobile homeowners more control over their disaster recovery options, but current laws still limit that ability. This study and future work have the potential to help mobile homeowners, an understudied yet growing population, experience a more equitable disaster recovery, which currently is lacking, based on the reviewed federal and state policies.

This dissertation explores the passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) through John Kingdon’s (2003) Multiple Streams Theory. A policy analysis of the FFATA was conducted adapting Bardach’s Eightfold Path to Effective Problem Solving (2005) to explore the effectiveness of the FFATA. The dissertation focused on the attempt of the FFATA to account for the acceptable disbursement and use of disaster recovery payments and the ability of faith based initiatives to provide relief without compromising the separation of church and state principle through a coupling event. Additionally, this research sought to determine if faith based initiatives created a greater risk in awarding Stafford Act’s Public Assistance Grant Funds in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The study found the FFATA is not successfully meeting its goals and objectives in disaster recovery situations as it relates to Public Assistance Grants after Katrina because it fails to trace federal funding to the actual recipient of the grant. To determine if faith based initiatives created a greater risk in awarding Public Assistance Grant Funds after Katrina, 75 reports published by Office of Inspector General on Hurricane Katrina were reviewed to determine which types of compliance issues auditors have found with entities receiving federal funding under this grant program. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis and document analysis was performed on the collected data. Data showed that public entities have a higher percentage of questioned costs in comparison to faith based organizations. Content analysis revealed that 100 percent of public entities still spent the money on some other public purpose, but not necessarily a disaster-related purpose as required by federal rules specific to the PA Grant Program. Faith based organizations were more likely to have a violation of federal rules where the money ultimately was not traceable, indicating a greater risk of faith based organizations to violate the separation of church and state principle.

Disaster recovery is an important aspect to consider when working in distributed systems and cloud environments. How should a system be saved when the physical infrastructure is faced with natural disasters like earthquakes and floods or more technical disasters like power outages and cyber-attacks? This thesis introduces the concept of disaster recovery and the different approaches that can be applied, specifically to a trading platform's matching engine. Experiments with three different kinds of disaster recovery methods are run, namely, Hot, Warm, and Cold, both on a local machine and using AWS cloud. The key performance indicators of these experiments are resource costs like CPU and memory usage, along with the startup time of a site, called Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The results show that the hot method clearly uses more resources during normal operation, followed by the warm site. The cold site which is inactive does not use any resources. Regarding the RTO, the hot site achieves the fastest time followed by the warm site. The cold site is tested with different sizes of states and snapshots, and the results show that a significant improvement of the RTO can gained by using snapshots. The local experiment performs better on all sites compared to running it on the cloud, implying that latency affects the performance substantially. With these findings, businesses should better be able to decide what method would be suitable for their system based on their needs and resources. For systems where maximum uptime is crucial, a hot approach is likely to be most suitable, while for systems where downtime is not as important, a warm or cold approach may be preferred. / <p></p><p></p><p></p>

This master thesis deals and analyzes the problems in the area of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy. It proposes a possible solutions, its practical implementation in the real environment of bank. Part of this work speaks about theoretical background, second part of this work analyzes the current situation, which describes the deficiencies in the given directions and in the end are explained my practical advices for implementation of the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy.