In a desaster like the one in New York, Can we be prepared?

Colaboration by Moises Lopez Business Continuity Consultant at Grupo SIA

From my point of view, except multinational companies with a global and diversificated market which don’t depend on one or two locations, in disaster like this one very few companies can resist.

When identifying resources required to business continuity, every organization can estimate the amount of resources they will need to assure their resilience for each activity. Having a deeply look into some of the main resources supporting business, can find:

• People: welfare has to be a priority and, in this case, forecast and advertising is an advantage to assure their safety. Except emergency services, nobody should be in their jobs, moreover, in this case there has been some victims.

With city paralyzed and employees only available in their houses, Will only technology support all the business? Are workforce prepared to develop their activities when their city is under emergency?

• Technology: with power outages and floods, it’s very difficult to maintain a adequate service level, even if our IT infrastructures are based in Cloud. Even more, Can we assure that our employees’ communication provider will still deliver services in this scenario?
• Providers: We can have the most restrictive service level agreement that, in this scenario will be wet paper. Moreover, we can have back up providers, but Can they will deliver the service in a proper way?  Can they deliver services even in scenarios in which we can’t?
• Locations: When city is not available, Will our facilities be available?

We can have a business continuity plan, with a communications plan properly defined, the response and emergency procedures also established,  even we could have decided to establish our backup datacenter in other city, but our budget and technology could be enough to put it in New Jersey, for example,… If despite all this measures we cannot restore our business, then we can only hope the help of the government or pay of insurance premium.

As a conclusión, if the scope of unavailability is as big as our city and around, it will be time to start from the beginning.. or  Would be realistic to consider as an scenario in our plan about “unavailability of the whole city”, if the city is our main operation center?  How many companies in Spain would be able to assure it resilience in such a big disaster situation?