Is your IT shop prepared for swine flu?

What is your pandemic plan? If you don't have one, you better start writing it now. With the number of swine flu cases growing in the United States, companies need to take a hard look at how they can operate in the event of a large-scale flu epidemic. Are your telework plans in order? Do you have contingency plans for any number of scenarios?

Executives "should stay calm and wash their hands, it's not even an epidemic yet much less a pandemic," Rick DeLotto, principal research analyst at Gartner, tells Business Week.

It's important to look at the possibility that worker absentee rates could climb to 40 percent. And if a pandemic occurs, the IT department will be one of the hardest hit because it's a 24/7 operation. What's more, if your IT staff had to do 24-hour shifts, managers should consider how they would feed them in the middle of the night, says DeLotto.

If you haven't done any preparation for a pandemic, the time to start is now. And if you have, you are one of the lucky ones who likely remembered that IT will be an important component of keeping your operation up and running in the bleakest of times.

For more on pandemic preparation:
- check out this BusinessWeek.com article

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