| Manchester incident displays telecoms dependencies
The fire in a tunnel underneath the junction of George Street and Princess Street in Manchester city centre resulted in approximately 130,000 landlines across the north west of England being out of action for the whole day. Communication problems are expected to continue through today. Various business recovery centres around the region were in action, with SunGard reporting that five clients placed the company on standby yesterday morning, with three of these progressing to full invocations. SunGard’s Stockport facility was affected by the BT fire but the company was able to invoke its own roll-back plans to ensure that it accommodated customers at alternate sites with fully operational communications. This was achieved using SunGard’s Warrington, Normanton (Leeds) and Coventry facilities. Various business continuity issues were raised by the incident, including: • The importance of telecoms continuity planning. This incident displays just how reliant modern businesses are on telecoms, confirming the findings of the recent Business Continuity Institute / Chartered Management Institute survey which found that loss of telecoms services was one of the top two most common causes of business disruption. • The importance of dependency modelling during business impact analysis. Many dependencies were displayed in this incident. For example, emergency services had to switch from radio communications to mobile phones because radio communications in north west England are routed via landlines. In another example many retailers were affected yesterday because credit card handling systems and EPOS network connections were unavailable. Some retailers used manual credit card swipe systems as a contingency, but some simply were unable to handle credit cards at all. • The importance of coordination with local authorities and the consideration of exclusion zones when developing business continuity plans. Although the fire was brought under control by mid-morning, British Telecom was not allowed access to the site by fire-fighters until much later in the day, delaying engineers' inspections, with the knock-on effect of delaying disaster recovery measures. UK local authorities and businesses would benefit from agreements being trialled in the United States, where authorised and safety-trained business representatives are escorted into incident-zones at the earliest possible stage to enable inspections to take place.
•Date:
30th March 2004 •Region: UK •Type:
Article •Topic: Telecoms
continuity |
