For those of you who don’t believe that it will happen to you, remember the heavy snowfall in early 2010, the flooding of the lake district in 2009 and more spectacularly disasters such as the buncefield explosion?
The difference between how these companies dealt with these disasters was vast, with only a small number of them having an effective disaster recovery plan in place. However, those that did were least affected and managed to get their businesses up and running again very quickly, the others, well, thery are still suffering the consequences.
Buncefield explosion costs nearing businesses millions
In December 2005 Buncefield Oil storage depot exploded due to fuel escaping, vaporising and forming a flammable mixture that ignited causing devastating effects. Surrounding commercial and residential properties encountered significant damage and had to be evacuated, as the fire burnt for seven days followed by extreme smoke and air pollution, creating serious downtime for surrounding businesses. The M1 motorway was also closed in sections.
25 businesses were seriously affected by the explosion and 16 of these had to entirely relocate their operations, in total it cost local businesses over £70 million. David Marlow, chief executive of EEDA, said: “small firms have been especially hard hit as they often operate from one single site; therefore it is imperative that future measures are put in place to combat this.”
To read more about this incident, please click here.
Floods in Cumbria had serious effect on businesses
In November 2009 Cumbria saw exceptionally prolonged and heavy rainfall which led to extreme flooding. Cumbria has an economy with over 20,000 enterprises which together produce £6.7bn in gross value. Major business sectors include manufacturing, tourism-related and the public sector.
The floods created a 30% drop in local business sales along with serious downtime and refurbishment costs. In total the floods brought £1.6m worth of damage to the picturesque county and its economy.
To read more about the Cumbria flooding, please click here.
Heaviest snow fall to hit the UK in decades
In December-January, 2009-2010 England was hit with heavy snowfall affecting mobility on roads and trains. This created an inability for staff to get to work. The federation of small businesses estimated 20% of the UK’s working population did not make it to work, causing a £3bn cost to the economy.
This loss of productivity due to the bad weather had a hit on the cash flow of many companies and delayed payments due to the disruption meant the potential for 2,000 to 3,000 businesses to fail. It was reported that businesses dealing with the bad weather had looked to putting into action their business continuity plans to prevent serious loss of productivity, customers and revenue.
To read more on the effects of the snowfall on businesses, please click here.
Testimonial 1
A Property Development company based in Northampton were experiencing intermittent power outages. After speaking with their electricity provider they were informed that they should expect this disruption for the next 2 days due to multiple issues with the substation and infrastructure supplying the area.
At 11am on the 1st day the directors decided to invoke their disaster recovery plan with Onyx Group.
“Our main concern was that we were unable to have any guaranteed continuity of our systems and telephones, and as we were in the middle of securing a large contract with 3 companies in Europe, access to our data and communications was essential”.
By 2pm the crisis team had been relocated into their Workplace Recovery Centre, and were able to access their most current emails and data utilising Onyx Group's Data and Server DR services. Most critically, their telephones had been diverted to the Recovery Centre within 1 hour of their invocation and messages were being taken and forwarded onto the relevant people, prior to their arrival. They were able to move back into their offices 3 days later, and they won the contact.
Testimonial 2 - Stuart McWhinnie; Business Development & Technology Director, SPH One Search
At 3.50am OneSearch Direct developed an engineering fault in their air con unit which resulted in a fire destroying the entire office workspace. “As a provider of conveyancing search information in the property industry we rely completely on our IT infrastructure to keep in contact with our clients and provide our services, we could not afford any downtime”.
At 7.30am they invoked their DR plan with Onyx Group and by 11.30am had relocated to a workplace recovery centre with full access to workstations with pc’s, internet, telephones and access to company data. Meaning productivity was fully resumed by 8.30am the following day, and even managed to despatch some of their product by close of play on the first day.
“Without our business continuity plan from Onyx Group our company would have suffered serious downtime, failure to meet deadlines and a big knock to our reputation, we were pleased with Onyx Groups professional, quick response which allowed OneSearch to be untarnished through what could have been a seriously damaging incident”.
