disaster recovery
“San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts. Its industrial section is wiped out. Its business section is wiped out. Its social and residential section is wiped out. The factories and warehouses, the great stores and newspaper buildings, the hotels and the palaces of the nabobs, are all gone.”
These are the words of Jack London, author of The Call of the Wild, on surveying the damage caused by the earthquake which hit San Francisco 100 years ago this coming April 18th. If such an earthquake were to happen today - and the seismologists say that San Fran is due for another big one in the next 25 years – the magnitude of the disaster is unlikely to be any less.
Yet disasters that cause massive disruption to businesses are not once a century occurrences. In the past year and a half alone we have had the Asian tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan and Hurricane Rita hitting New Orleans. These are just the natural disasters too. The July 7 bombings on the London Underground were all too human in cause and cost.
Although there are worrying signs that natural disasters are occurring with increasing frequency, perhaps as a result of global warming, it took something unnatural for many companies to start thinking about what to do in the event of a disaster.
For many companies, 9/11 was the catalyst that made them sit up and wonder whether they really knew where their employees were and how they would be affected. As pictures of the World Trade Center collapsing hit television screens around the world, many chief executives realised they didn’t.
As a result, companies have implemented disaster measures in two key areas – the first in quickly knowing exactly where their employees are at any given time and the second in making contingency plans that allow their businesses to continue operating come what may.
The London Tube bombings of July 7 were a
particular test of the ability of companies to cope in the event of
a disaster.
American Express, as well as having business travel clients whose
employees were affected, was itself affected that day.
The company had made plans for such disasters following the events
of 9/11, in which 11 of the company’s employees lost their lives.
Suzan Kereere, senior vice president and general manager for service delivery at American Express, says: “One of the things we learned from 9/11 was that our information systems needed to be more robust because we had not counted on that particular disaster and had no processes in place for our managers to account for our people. Much of what we were able to do with the London bombings was refined over the last few years in response to 9/11.” The company has 2,500 staff based in London. “We managed to track down all but ten of those people within an hour,” says Kereere. “The remaining ten took another two hours.
Site managers at the company’s offices around
the capital were able to detail those employees who were on company
premises. The company’s Trackpoint traveller security system was
then used to locate employees who were travelling on business.
Although Trackpoint was able to pinpoint those employees who were on
a flight, finding those who might have been on the Tube was more
problematic.
One of the new processes introduced after 9/11 was for employees to contact their managers in the event of a disaster and this, in particular, proved vital in locating the remaining ten employees.
“One of our employees was severely injured in the bombings and as a result was not able to call into their managers. A good Samaritan on the Tube, on seeing our employee injured, looked at their mobile phone to see if they could call someone and managed to call her flatmate who got in touch with her manager.”
The London bombings exposed a weakness in this disaster plan – no-one predicted the effect on the mobile phone networks. These groaned under the pressure as millions of calls were made by people wanting their family, friends and colleagues to know that they were fine. Although all the networks claim that their systems never broke down completely, many people found that they were unable to make calls for hours afterwards because of the unprecedented call volume.
Bernard Harrop of American Express says that employees need to be trained to follow business continuity plans in the same way that most employees know the fire drill. “Here in Portland House at 11am on Tuesday a fire alarm goes off. We have all gone through the exercise, we know what to do and where to go. We are trying to instill processes in everybody such that if the London bombings or another disaster occurred again they would know what to do.” Seven months earlier, it was the Asian tsunami that put companies’ plans to the test.
BTI UK’s Mike Platt says that the company’s response to the tsunami had two elements - communicating details of the crisis to our customer base and identifying any travellers in the affected areas and providing support for them.
”Once the news broke there was initially a great deal of uncorroborated information which, although constantly changing, did later become clearer,” says Platt. “We decided, therefore, that rather than try to gather and disseminate this news which was already being broadcast to the whole world on an hourly basis, the best plan would to focus on pinpointing any clients who may have been involved.”
”When the first news broke, using our emergency plan we were able to call in extra staff to man our 24 Hour Emergency Assist unit in Egham where the lines were initially very busy. However, by deploying our PeopleTracker product, the 24 Hours team immediately ran a complete check on all bookings made through BTI UK to the affected areas. We identified a small number of travellers and were able to make immediate contact with most of them. We only had one serious situation but successfully managed to charter a light aircraft to get a customer and his family out of Phuket the day after Boxing Day.” Since then, BTI UK has rolled out another product to help companies recover from disasters.
BTI Travel Alert is a system that works on its own or in conjunction with BTI PeopleTracker to inform travellers by SMS or email of any recent or imminent event, such as terrorist action, natural disasters and severe weather, that may affect travel plans. Travellers can then make a choice whether to change their plans.
Corporate recovery after a disaster is not just about making sure employees are safe – there is also the matter of the continuity of the business. Good business continuity plans are generally not overly prescriptive in that it is far better to plan for the effects of a disaster rather than focusing too much on the causes.
For example, in the event of a disaster there can often be problems with computer systems, especially if all or part of them are destroyed. A good business continuity plan would insist on regular back-up of information held on the system, often in a separate geographical location. A more sophisticated plan might see a company build in so-called redundancy and have a back-up corporate computer system in place that switches on if the main system goes down or is destroyed.
One company that does exactly that is Amadeus. The company’s global distribution technology is in use around the globe and the clock in airlines, corporations and travel agencies. Denis Lacroix, head of product development at Amadeus’ E-Travel technology arm, says that the company’s target is to remain available 99.99 per cent of the time with unscheduled downtime of just four minutes per month. “Our entire hardware infrastructure is redundant from the ground up,” says Lacroix., This means that if a disk, power supply, firewall or server goes down, airline and travel agency customers can still book. The company also uses three different internet service providers to connect its data centre to the outside world.”
Business continuity plans for disasters are often split into three phases. The first is the initial response, when the company focuses on understanding exactly what has happened, limiting damage to the company, in terms of employees, assets, infrastructure and reputation, and communicating to its stakeholders. The second phase is the process of restarting critical processes. This might include moving to a back-up computer system or finding safer ways for employees to travel or to avoid travel, such as videoconferencing. The third phase is long-term recovery, getting everything working as well or better than before the disaster occurred.
The problem with disaster recovery planning is
that until a disaster occurs, it can seem like a poor return on
investment. But come this April 18th, Jack London’s narrative will
be remembered earnestly by anyone who does business in San Francisco
and should be heeded by everyone who does business in a world where
disaster may well be just around the corner.