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Lessons from Manchester

Carrier Hotels Staff Posted Apr 1, 2004

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Businesses in Manchester, England continue to be affected by a fire in a BT tunnel Monday that damaged phone lines serving substantial portions of the city. At its height, the outage affected 130,000 phone lines, most of which are now receiving at least partial service.

The fire immediately became a source of intrigue and speculation that the fire occurred in a Cold Ware-era underground "telecom bunker" known as the Guardian Underground Telecom Exchange. The facility, parts of which are more than 100 feet undergound, was built to withstand an atomic blast. For the record, BT insists the fire occurred in a separate tunnel unrelated to the Guardian exchange, although numerous UK telecom gadflies say otherwise.

What's not in doubt is that the fire tested the business continuity plans of area businesses. As with every widespread power or telecom outage, the event forced businesses to test their continuity plans and sort out which elements worked well, and identify the areas where reality diverged from the assumptions used to develop the plan.

The excellent British web resource Continuity Central has a post-mortem analysis from IBM"s Robin Gaddum titled Further Lessons Learned From Manchester.

"This incident reinforces the need to select a recovery site location with some care to avoid live and disaster recovery site being affected by the same event," writes Gaddum. "Too often we focus upon distance and ignore other potential risk profiles that do not vary in a linear fashion with distance. Relying upon the same exchange is one example, same flood plain is another example."

Sound familiar? The "distance debate" featured prominently in federal regulators deliberations on disaster recovery guidelines for Wall Street. Business continuity doesn't require reinventing the wheel - just mastering the basics and updating your plan as your business evolves.