Sabotage

Yesterday, talking with the chief of Business Continuity consultancy in one of the main companies of the industry in Spain, we have doubts about if the case of sabotage in the power infrastructure in Rayo Vallecano's stadium should be consider as a scenario in Business Continuity plans.

On the one hand, it could be clear that a scenario of lack of power, no matter the origin, must be included in BC plans. Measures to assure power are very common: generators, two power providers, etc.

On the other hand, the sabotage in football match between Rayo Vallecano - Real Madrid has two special considerations:

• The stadium must be available at a specific time and during a relatively short period (2 hours)  There is not possibility to play the match in other stadium - it would be impossible to move 15.000 - and it's not possible to play at other time, since the main business to be continued is the is the television retransmission.
• Internal electrical infraestructure were damaged, so there is no way to use an alternative infrastructure. It has to be repaired.

Since Business Continuity has to focus on moments after an events occurs, and the plans covers the actions to be taken on this moments, its seems to be difficult that the staff of Rayo Vallecano could done something different if they would have a Business Continuity plan. Traditional measures would be not effective in this scenario because it was damaged the internal infrastructure. So this scenario is only useful to analyze risks and define the mitigation measures.

In general terms, when business depends on somebody doing something in a certain location, business continuity plans doesn't help too much: It's not possible to change actors, location or time, so we can only make a good risk analysis and try to mitigate it as far as we can.