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Give me POWER: How to keep working when the lights go out
Business continuity is not a dirty word. It's two words. But they're not dirty ones
Spreading your risk
Businesses with more than one office have the advantage that they're unlikely to lose the use of more than one premises at the same time – assuming of course that the locations are reasonably spread out. If you're going to have two locations in the same city, then put them at opposite ends and do what you can to ensure that their power provision comes from separate substations (or even providers) and that the telecoms services are disparately provided with resilient/redundant exchanges, trunks and cable paths. If you have offices in different towns then that's fine, but remember that having working premises is only half the battle – you need your key staff to be able to get there if distributed office operation is your business continuity strategy.
Power protection and replacement
I've already mentioned the trucks that appeared on the streets of London carrying generators to businesses that found themselves in the dark. What I haven't mentioned is that many of those generators will have been supplied under existing contracts to companies that had thought ahead about what they'd do in the event of a power cut. After all, although the London blaze was exceptionally spectacular, it's not all that uncommon to have a common or garden power cut, and so generator provision is part of many businesses' ongoing plans – as it was for the company I consulted for in North Yorkshire.
Business continuity suites
If you can't guarantee to get the lights back on, then one answer for those who can afford it is to rent space in a dedicated business-continuity facility. These are typically just rooms full of desks and chairs in a location with services protected in the manner of a typical data centre – N+1 power, a low flood risk, high-grade fire protection and so on.
Business continuity suites are generally a highly robust way to protect your ability to work, but they come at a price: first of all you have to pay rent on a premises that you'll use very seldom, and secondly you have to equip the premises to the required standard (and monitor it constantly, and keep the PC and phone software revisions upgraded along with the core systems that are in day-to-day use, and so on). The average business-continuity suite is generally big enough to support only a portion of the employee base in order to keep a skeleton service running – an area big enough to house everybody would be economically out of the question, unless high-level continuity of the majority of one's day-to-day operation is necessary.
Working at home
A much cheaper alternative is to adopt a formal business-continuity policy of having people work at home in times of duress. It's an increasingly popular choice these days because:
- It's not really much more expensive to give a user a company laptop than a company desktop, so users are inherently more mobile and able to work remotely
- With core applications in data centres, or alternatively in the cloud, it's pretty easy to provide access for users wherever they're located
- Security techniques such as two-factor authentication are so easy and cheap these days that the compliance and governance issues of remote working are gradually evaporating
- Internet connectivity to the average home is fast and excellent (I just measured mine at 32.49Mbit/s, which is pretty normal these days) and so the user experience of business apps can be identical at home and in the office