The floods that we have endured in late 2013 and early 2014 have been real eye openers. We have seen houses and lots of businesses severely affected by the weather and it does beg the question: What would you do if your building/offices were under several feet of water?
Many facts are thrown around these days as bonafide statistics and many are inaccurate, unprovable and downright incorrect but one stat that we could verify was from the DTI in 2006 which, in a report regarding Flood Risk Assessment, stated that only 1 in 20 businesses could run without their IT systems in place (that was in 2006) and it is unlikely that this statistic has improved.
RISING RISK TO PROPERTY AND ROADWAYS
Do your customers have disaster recovery solutions in place? Are they prepared to pay for them?
Is the disaster recovery solution suitable for the businesses needs? How will their staff be affected and will remote working be possible? These are not pleasant questions to ask a client and they never will be but you can use the cautionary tales within this article to put your point across. If they don’t have the answers to these questions then their business is at risk – plain and simple.
Fluvial flooding (river floods) is no longer an exclusively rural problem either; cities are being affected more and more as the years go on. Record breaking water levels in cities are having a huge impact on the economy and even coastal areas that have sea defences have been overcome recently so it appears we cannot stop the water; we must find other ways to protect ourselves instead. Flash floods are becoming more regular as well, many UK cities were built or rebuilt in the Victorian era so this means that the sewers and drainage in general are not up to modern day use and simply cannot cope with the volume of water that is being forced through the system.
RISK TO INFRASTRUCTURE
Apart from the human and structural costs associated with flooding, large portions of infrastructure in England & Wales are at risk of flooding, which could compound ttoal damage in the event of major flood.
There are solutions out there, some more effective than others but the one must have for any business is a fully protected IT infrastructure and completely safe and backed up data.
Options such as:
- Hosted Desktops (include full disaster recovery in most cases as standard).
- Online backup service are far cheaper than most companies would expect and can offer disaster recovery servers to restore the data onto.
- Data replicating to a B site/datacentre that would take over instantly.
In the event of an emergency all of these option gives the customer great peace of mind. The solutions are out there and businesses do need to take responsibility for there continued working capabilities but the IT industry and particularly the support sector has to make it clear that backing up and restoring data is no longer optional.
Information Sources (DTI,DEFRA,EA)
