Haiti is the poorest country in the west and struggles economically.  Businesses in Haiti will struggle returning back to business, looting will take place and there is very little insurance to recover the local business. The Globe has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to assist in the recovery of the country and the infrastructure.  This is only one step into the recovery of the country.

As aid is slow to move and being distributed to the most needy it is inevitable that looting will begin.  The looting will start at supermarkets and anywhere where there is a source of food and water. The local government will have to ensure the security of the businesses, as this will be the only source of income in the months to come.  The airport is also struggling with capacity as the world tries to unite in its assistance to the country.

The USA is providing not only financial support but they have offered rescue teams, troops, infrastructure support teams and fuel.

Hospital services are non-existent as they were all flattened when the earthquake struck.  The 7.0 Magnitude earthquake could not have been predicted and caused massive devastation to the country.  Killing approx 150,000 people including women and children, this is the worst disaster on record for Haiti.  The problems don’t will continue in the next few months, as the country will be hit by the seasonal hurricanes and bad weather.  This will add complications to the aid delivery and the millions of the displaced people currently living in tents and makeshift shacks.

The recovery efforts will take up to 10 years for the country to recover from the earthquake.  However, it will take about 2 years to remove the rubble and assess the full damage that the country has sustained, both physically and economically.

However, many businesses are still not operating and some of the roads are still unsafe or impassable.  With Christmas being the busiest time of year for most of retail businesses, the Cumbrian community have suffering.

Any disaster occurring can be damaging to a business, however, seasonal impacts are damaging to businesses.  For example a town centre retail shop will be looking to make good profits at Christmas time, whereas a tourist based business will be looking to capitalise on the UK summer months.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes.  Most people visualise a disaster as a flood or an explosion, but a disaster could be more loacalised, such as a major server failure or an engineer drilling through a major telecoms cable.  A disaster should be looked on as “Anything that detrimentally affects your business”.  Working on that basis you should look at all potential failures and risk assess your needs.

Some people in Cumbria were not directly affected by the floods but have suffered because of the damage to the road and bridge network.  This could be that staff can’t get to work or suppliers have to charge more because of the diversions.

A good business leader will have options and will always have a plan.  It is essential that the plan is well practiced and that its not just locked in a cabinet collecting dust.  It should also be adapted as the business needs adapt and as the environment adapts.  A classic example was major credit card company in the UK came to practice a 2 year old disaster recovery plan, plan only to realise that the staff were not trained on the old software.  They made the assumption that they could roll back to a previous computer setup in the event of an emergency, however as they have a high turnover of staff they soon realised that their staff were not trained to use the old software.

They, however, put together a 1 hour training package and took the risk that there would be basic mistakes.   This was a good example of an adapting business manager.  However, they have now changed their disaster recovery plan to incorporate regular software updates and a strategy to practice the plan once every 12 months.

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

disaster recovery

From senior management disinterest to a failure to undertake regular testing, half-hearted investment in disaster recovery is a waste of money. There are five major issues that should red flag if your disaster recovery plan in flawed.

1. The board agrees to the need for disaster recovery plan but refuses to allow comprehensive testing. Fears of lost productivity and business disruption are the regular reasons cited by senior management for not undertaking a full disaster recovery test. IT teams are encouraged to focus on basic operational tasks such as restoring servers instead. But without a real-life simulation of disaster there is no way of predicting just where the Disaster Recovery plan may fall down.  It is essential to perform regular disaster recovery tests to ensure that every single server can be recovered within the recovery time objective. It is also beneficial if a senior member of your team has been on a disaster recovery awareness course. Regularly and fully test your disaster recovery plan including relocating back-office services to a stand-by site. This way you can be confident that in the event of an emergency you are completely prepared.

2. There is only one copy of the disaster recovery plan and it’s kept on business premises. It is a simple but obvious mistake – the building is on fire and the only copy of the disaster recovery plan just went up in smoke, leaving the organisation completely without any key contact details and any plans for operational procedure in an emergency.  The solution is obvious; keep multiple copies of your disaster recovery plan, with copies available off-site.

3. The back-up data is never tested. Too many organizations assume that regular back-up processes are backing up the right information. However, when organisations do test the quality of the back-up, many discover that entirely the wrong data has been backed up.  Therefore, regular testing of the quality of the data is essential.  Also, it is important to estimate accurately the time it takes for these back-up servers  to restore data in the event of a disaster.  If it takes a minimum of three days to restore you to full capacity, you are likely to be out of business by then.  Finding alternative and quicker data recovery will save you in the long term.

4. If your business intends to rely on mobiles phones for communication in the event of an emergency have in place a telephony contingency plan. Mobiles may work for a couple of hours, but if the business suffers any major event, especially one that affects a large number of people and companies, a mobile is not a reliable option. The mobile network will, as has been seen in major events, suffer significant performance problems. Having an alternative system in place to reroute calls to a temporary office of employee’s home number could put you ahead of the game in a major disaster.

5. Far too many IT teams, when tasked with designing a Disaster Recovery strategy, simply download a basic template from the Internet and fill in the gaps. The resulting, short document is woefully inadequate and fails to address any of the business-specific issues that determine ongoing success in the event of a disaster.  A successful disaster recovery plan should encompass buildings, staff and back-up provisions.  Doing a cut and paste job on a down-loadable template is not a Disaster Recovery strategy.

disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is by its very nature the recovery from a disaster.  Disasters come in many forms, so when making your decision and looking at your disaster recovery plan you should consider some of the following disasters;

Office theft (complete theft of all IT equipment)

Fire

Flood

Bomb Damage  (Directly or indirectly)

Staff illness (Pandemic)

Snow (All adverse weather)

Building damage

Total server failure for more than 8 hours

These are just some of the disasters that could hit your business and most of them could hit your business hard.  Outlined below are some points which you should consider for any plan;

Building access

This is likely to be effected in most of the disaster cases.  What would you need from your business premises to make your business continue running?  Can you replicate these items at a safe location away from the business? Common items are documents, contact details, financial accounts.

Staff

Can you account for all your staff at any one point within business hours?  Do you have a way of knowing whether one of your employees is left in the building?

Staff 2

Do you have a way of either giving staff access to systems off site (option usually available if working from home or at a remote location) or in the worst case do you have a facility to recruit temporary staff quickly to see you through the disaster.

Technology

Can your staff work on a manual system?  Ideally speaking to someone like www.i2office.co.uk could assist you in having a full backup office and computers and would help you in the event of such a disaster.

Building

Should the worst happen either through a terrorist attack, weather disaster or just damage to the building, the chances are you won’t get access to the building for some time.  This could be days, weeks and at worst case years.  Therefore you should consider a backup building, but not too close.  One of the mistakes highlighted from 9/11 was that their backup was in a building next to the tower.  Again businesses in the UK had backups close to their existing businesses and when they were hit by floods then their backup was also affected.  Consider having your backup in a local town close to your office but far enough away that they are not likely to be affected by the disaster.

PRACTICE

This is in bold as it’s one of the main points of disaster recovery that businesses fail on.  A well rehearsed plan is likely to succeed but if you’re relying on a plan put together in an office and never practiced then you’re likely to fail.  Most lessons learned are when the moment happens, if your plan is rehearsed then you will learn the lessons well before you have to implement the plan for real.

Disaster recovery

September is National Preparedness Month (NPM) in the USA.  The scheme is designed to ensure that companies are prepared.  Not surprisingly September is the month of the 911 tragedies and seems like a fitting time to remind companies of the need for a disaster recovery plan.

One thing that the NPM promote is to have a three day survival plan, this may seem a bit extreme, but if you actually look at their plans it makes sense.

Most eventualities are over in three days and even in the worst case the first 72 hrs of any disaster are usually the worst, so a three day plan isn’t that bad.

Putting it into perspective, the floods  in Gloucester last year stopped approximately a 1000 business owners entering their premises and conducting work for 3 days, and a further 400 Businesses could not operate for an additional 4 days.

From these tragic events 30% of the businesses failed to recover from the crisis and the majority of the businesses affected said that they lost business, revenue and profit.

However, 16 companies had disaster recovery plans which were well rehearsed.  Steve from ArcTel said “We had a disaster recovery plan but never thought we would have to use it………You always assume a plan like this is made up for a fire or a bomb attack and most of us here never thought we would have been flooded out for 6 days”

We asked Steve what he would do for the future – “You can’t prepare for every eventuality but having a general preparation and disaster recovery plan is essential, I can’t stress enough on how much business we would have lost if we hadn’t got a plan.  None of this would be here today if we didn’t take the action we took at the time” Steve went on to say “I can’t scream it out loud enough, make sure you have a disaster recovery plan, it will save your business”.

The government backs the American National Preparedness Month and the UK government are looking at this initiative to try and deliver the preparation message out to small, medium and large businesses in the UK.  At a time where purse strings are strained  any disaster could cripple the UK economy, the move to create awareness makes sense.

Disaster Recovery - http://wwwi2office.co.uk

Being prepared is the key to any disaster recovery plan.  Major corporations employ a full team of people to conduct disaster recovery planning, whilst smaller businesses don’t have that luxury they have to do it themselves.  You will not be able to plan for every eventuality but planning for most will give you the flexibility should you need to adapt your plan on the fly.

In America businesses across the nation plan for disaster every year and have to implement their plan year on year, due to natural weather conditions.  For example, Florida companies have become experts on disaster recovery from hurricanes and the associated disaster that follows them.  Tornado Ally is another region where disaster recovery plans are implemented year on year.

In the UK we do not plan for major weather events.  However, some of these will cripple any business if they do not take the appropriate measures.  The met office predicts each seasons weather (sometimes accurately but sometimes not so accurately) however, being prepared is the key.

The Met Office early indications are that winter precipitation is likely to be near or above average over much of northern Europe. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be wetter than last year.

What do we mean by average rainfall?

We base our average rainfall on measurements over the whole season for the years 1971-2000. The UK average for December to February is 332 mm.

This could lead to flooding – could your business cope if you were flooded out of your office?

Early indications are that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year.

What do we mean by average temperature?

As you would expect, temperatures can vary quite widely over the winter. So we take an average for the whole season and measure against that. The UK average for December to February from 1971-2000 is 3.7 °C.

This is an early assessment from the Met office and their official prediction is released in September.  It’s worth noting that if they predict a very cold harsh winter the power industry always put out potential warnings of blackouts and brown outs depending on the demand.   UPS (uninterrupted power supply) systems can easily combat this for your business and they are generally not that expensive.  They can give your PC and server systems up to 8 hours power supply; this backed up with mobile broadband can keep your business alive when all others are down.

Disaster Recovery - www.i2office.co.uk

Local companies in UAE see disaster recovery planning as important – Symantec survey

Symantec conducted a recent survey, and found that the potential loss of data (78%) and the actual cost of downtime (48%) are the two main concerns for UAE companies when it comes to disaster recovery.

Symantec conducted a comprehensive survey, which was carried out on 1650 companies and spanned across 24 countries globally.  The survey observed a shift in attitude in local businesses, which are increasing utilising, and testing their disaster recovery plans like their international counterparts.

The survey highlights the best UAE businesses compare very favourably to their international counterparts, with 76% indicating that they were testing their DR systems every six months or more frequently.

‘This is the clearest indication thus far that the top rungs of UAE organisations are becoming more serious about the implementation and testing of their disaster recovery plans,’ says Anthony Harrison, senior technical account manager, Symantec.

The top reasons for implementing and testing DR plans in the UAE were hardware or software issues causing system failure (84%), and external computer threats such as viruses or hacking attempts (80%).

‘Preparation is critical,’ says Harrison. ‘It is possible to build system tests in such a way that they can be run frequently without disrupting business operations. Greater automation in the testing process is key to ensuring that these tests have a minimal impact on the business.’

Viruses are becoming more and more of a concern as they are becoming more frequent and more complex.  Some of these viruses are becoming more harmful and could pose a serious and potential threat to businesses across the globe.

When systems fail, staff stop working and when this happens the business looses money.  If this is because of a virus then your business could be looking at some substantial downtime to eradicate this virus.

Its also essential to ensure your disaster recovery plan is virus free and up-to-date with virus definitions as your disaster recovery plan could also fall foul of this virus.  Some companies like to initiate a paper based plan as this can be inputted into electronic systems later once the virus has been eradicated.

It is just one other disaster scenario to consider when planning your disaster recovery plan.

Disaster Recovery - www.i2office.co.uk

Disaster recovery comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  The press release below highlights one such case.  Disaster recovery doesn’t always appear as a terrorist attack or a fire.  In this case it can be something as obscure as swine flu.  The reason being, what would you do if 60% of your workforce all of a sudden had to take time off due to swine flu, or what if the air-conditioning unit in the building was pumping out legionnaires disease?  Would you have to move office?  Shut the office down?  Take on contact staff?  These are all points, which you should have a contingency for.  I2office.co.uk can not only provide you with a workable and financial solution, but also have the partnership and support to assist you with your Disaster Recovery contingency needs.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) today proposed solutions to ease the pressure on small firms as a result of the swine flu pandemic.

In a letter to the Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, the FSB requested a meeting to discuss the threat of the pandemic to small firms. The FSB proposals include:
• simplifying the system by which the smallest firms are reimbursed for paying out statutory sick pay, and
• putting a stop to unnecessary routine business inspections during the height of the pandemic

John Wright, National Chairman, Federation of Small Businesses said:

“Swine flu is expected to have a serious impact on the UK, with a more than five per cent fall in UK GDP this year alone and up to half of the population infected. Although it is still difficult to estimate the full effect of the spread of the pandemic, we know that small firms – which contribute more than half of UK GDP and employ 60 per cent of the private sector workforce – will be very badly hit. A small firm employing only three people could expect to have all of its workforce off for up to two weeks this autumn – either due to infection or through absences as a result of school closures and transport problems.

“The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has been working with the Cabinet Office to prepare advice for small firms on how to plan for this emergency; to ensure they have good communications with staff in place, plans for remote working where possible, and prepare for a drop in demand.

“The FSB is also asking the Government to ease the burden on small firms by simplifying the system by which the smallest firms reclaim statutory sick pay. This will mean that small businesses with fewer than 20 employees are automatically entitled to repayment of sick pay during the epidemic.

“The other measure the FSB is calling for is that all routine inspections of businesses in high intensity infection areas are stopped during the pandemic, to reduce the burden of red tape on small firms.”