Flood Incident Shows Importance of Data Disaster Recovery

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An incident in which a business was forced to temporarily move out of its offices as a result of flooding has shown why it is important to take good care of data and paperwork – and potentially store them off company premises.

Last month, the heatwave experienced by much of the UK was broken by a wave of downpours and cooler temperatures, which brought with them flooding in many low-lying areas.

Staff at the Rutland and Stamford Mercury, the Rutland Times and The Local in central England were affected when their workplace at Sheep Market in Stamford began to fill up with water and they were forced to move to the offices of the nearby Peterborough Telegraph.

This meant they had to tell readers about their change of location and set up a new telephone number so they could be contacted and continue to work.

Although employees were only away from their usual desks for a few days while the damage was repaired and they could go back, it shows how easy it is for workplaces to fall victim to unforeseen disasters.

A growing threat?

Britain may not be threatened with hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires like some of the world's nations, but we have seen some erratic weather in recent times. Excepting summer 2013, the UK has been experiencing a run of very wet summers that have resulted in a series of 'flashy' flood events, damaging homes and businesses.

Peter Scott from the climate change monitoring and attribution team at the Met Office, told the Guardian he expects to see lots more alternating flood and drought episodes.

"Climate change is not a nice slow progression where the global climate warms by a few degrees. It means a much greater variability, far more extremes of weather," he warned.

Meanwhile, the recent Nature Climate Change study authored by Dr Stephane Hallegatte predicts that mean global sea level will rise by 0.2 to 0.4 metres by 2050.

This could mean rivers are more likely to break their banks after periods of heavy rain and coastal cities could find their flood defences breached more regularly.

Don't bury your head in the sand

Without wanting to indulge in scaremongering, it does make good sense for companies to take measures to protect their paperwork and IT infrastructure. Events such as flooding can result in a significant amount of downtime and this is likely to lead to losses in productivity while data disaster recovery takes place.

In May, the UN office for disaster risk reduction said it is going to become increasingly inappropriate for companies to assume such incidents won't happen to them and called on owners to incorporate disaster risk management into their investment strategies.

Dr Hallegatte pointed out: "There is a limit to what can be achieved with hard protection: populations and assets will remain vulnerable to defence failures or to exceptional events that exceed the protection design."

A potential solution

One way of averting catastrophe could be to implement offsite document storage and online hosting.

Susan Feinberg from Axway said in a recent article for Computer World that the only option for firms in future may be to abandon current approaches and bring in something that ensures operations can carry on running smoothly no matter what – something the cloud and third party storage can offer.

She said she expects to see wider adoption of this so that data can be managed offsite while staff work to rectify whatever situation is going on, be it flooding or something else.

If you're interested in improving your disaster recovery plans, Storetec can help you out. Our online document and data hosting solutions make it easy to store, manage and secure your documents in digital form, so that all of your company's archive documents, research data, correspondence, scans of physical documents, plans and intellectual property will be held at a high-capacity, central repository, out of harm's way.

Give us a call to find out more about how you could be up and running again in no time in the event of emergency.

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Incident Shows Importance of Data Disaster Recovery’. Aug 21, 2012. Storetec.