When heavy rain began to fall across swathes of the UK in June and July 2007, few organisations envisaged the devastation that would immediately follow. Fewer still had prepared their business and IT infrastructure for such a disaster.

When heavy rain began to fall across swathes of the UK in June and July 2007, few organisations envisaged the devastation that would immediately follow. Fewer still had prepared their business and IT infrastructure for such a disaster.

Even Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) never anticipated what turned out to be the greatest disruption to local services since the end of the Second World War.

‘The plan was written for a fire in the building, or a pandemic that would prevent people from getting into the main office in Gloucester,’ explains Glynis Morris, manager of GCC’s 96-seat call centre, which serves as the council’s initial point of public contact. ‘I don’t think anybody ever envisaged that a flood would effectively take out the whole county.’

Complex contingency
GCC was not the only organisation forced to think on its feet following the summer’s unprecedented rainfall. In the months since, some 14,500 flood-related insurance claims have been filed, the average value of which comes in at around £90,000, according to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI). In total, the floods inflicted damage worth more than £1.3 billion on the UK business community, and this figure could well grow.

By contrast, one organisation that has highly complex contingency planning is logistics provider Parcelforce. According to operational support manager Patrick Morgan, the company has planned for nearly every conceivable disruption: ‘Parcelforce is in a really competitive environment, meaning high availability is a key competitive differentiator… We have built into our plan all the possible emergency scenarios you can imagine.’

To diversify the risk to its IT and telephony infrastructure, the company has avoided the creation of giant, centralised contact centres. Instead, Parcelforce operates a number of fully networked ‘virtual’ contact centres situated in local depots. Consequently, very few of the company’s depots host any major hardware, and it enjoys considerable flexibility in its telephony infrastructure.

Disaster planning is equally vital for smaller businesses. Matthew O’Connor, managing director of communications at satellite service provider Avanti Communications, can ensure online access regardless of cables or DSL lines.

He notes that the larger corporates usually have a disaster recovery or business continuity plan, so it’s the smaller businesses that he’s targeting. ‘We think there are probably 50,000 to 70,000 businesses in the UK that have got circuits for the internet; if they go down tomorrow their customers will suffer.’