Disaster recovery is essential for any business – Most businesses think that the worst will never happen to them. Yet the recent floods in Cumbria, UK has highlighted the desperate need to review business continuity strategies.
The recent floods have hit small, medium and large business, in all sectors. Even some of the businesses and services you think should have the relevant disaster recovery plans, failed to put them into practice.
The advantage of these floods gives us the opportunity to look at some of the major failings and see how these could help your disaster recovery planning. I am sure there will be a full post mortem carried out by the local authority once the clean up operation begins.
In my opinion the first major failing was from the medical sector. Whilst the Ambulance and emergency services coped and performed their duties under strained conditions, the hospital and medical centres fail to have a disaster recovery plan that was effective.
Data that is stored and used locally should always be backed up to an area that could be accessed remotely in the event of a disaster. Sky news interviewed a doctor who was using valuable resources from an emergency vehicle to gain patient data from a medical centre. This clearly shows that the disaster recovery planning was not in place and practiced.
The second problem that is now coming to light is transport and that in its self has several issues in the long and short term.
With the failure of a number of bridges the road network has been greatly restricted and as the flood waters are still to high to give full assessments, a lot of the bridges have been closed or have been restricted to foot passenger’s only.
Cumbria is a rural region with lots of towns and villages connected by small roads. These small roads all connect these villages will people already living 20 miles away from their homes. The loss of the bridges in the road network means that employees may have to travel an additional 30-50 miles round trip to get to work. This is not always practical and in some cases these people will not be able to get to work.
Logistically this also present a number of other problems, such as food and essential supplies, why either homes and businesses had access to are no over 40 miles away and in some cases the only roads available to some of these villages are inaccessible to larger vehicles.
Some of the smaller businesses have lost a lot – Whilst they are insured, the insurance assessor will take time to come out, and then the insurance companies will take time to repair and rebuild the business. This could take months before the business can start to operate again from their existing premises. When planning your disaster recovery plan you should plan for the worst and assume you don’t have access to your own building for 6 weeks. If you get into the building before then it’s a bonus. But by the time the insurance company have assessed the damage, repaired the damage and financially compensated you for the damaged stock, its likely to be approx 6 weeks if not more.
We will continue to watch the out come of the floods and pick out sections of where you can
