Hurricane Sandy forged a path of destruction through the Caribbean and up into the United States hitting New York on October 29, 2012 with devastating consequences. The hurricane left hundreds of thousands of homes without power and up to 133 people died in total across the Caribbean and east coast of the US. As well as families being severely affected by the extreme weather, businesses operating in New York were subject to lengthy downtimes because they simply weren’t prepared for this kind of emergency situation. So what would a business need to think about if they were planning for a major disruption like hurricane Sandy? If power is going to go down across a major city then what resources can be relied on? Could we argue that printing hard copies of information normally stored digitally could offer a solution?
What are the options?
Every business should have a Business Continuity Management process planned out, and in places which are subject to extreme weather conditions, this should include how the business will cope if power goes down. The plan should come up with potential routes for getting back to business as usual with minimum downtime and disruption incurred. In the case of wide-scale power outage this means either finding alternative methods of supplying power so office infrastructure can be restored or finding different ways to operate when power goes down.
One office managed to completely avoid down time by using a cloud phone system. Fieldpoint Private experienced zero downtime during the aftermath of Sandy because the business has subscribed to a hosted phone service managed by a California-based communication services provider, off-site and far away from New York. Backed by a resilient data centre with multiple layers of backup power supply, Fieldpoint’s telephone service was not disrupted despite the company being based in New York.
It’s a smart idea, but the only issue with such a plan is the possibility of widespread downtime occurring. We assume that, since the internet has never gone down it is completely infallible, but it’s not as impossible as you might think.
Rethinking data: backing up the internet
Cyber terrorism isn’t just a sci-fi fantasy, and though the possibility of the internet “going down” isn’t likely, the possibility of it being severely disrupted by various influences isn’t so far-fetched. Wars of the future are likely to at least feature hacking of essential infrastructure if not be dominated by this method of waging war. There’s already evidence of major hacking practices against the US where hackers managed to subvert the company’s server in order to play games. Crucially they used up 95% of server power resources creating a “denial of service” attack on legitimate users. A computer virus known as stuxnet managed to hack into Iranian energy infrastructure, and hackers have gained access to electric utility IT systems in the US. If hackers can get access to essential systems like power supplies they can genuinely wreak havoc, something recognised by the US defence secretary who has warned that the “potential for another Pearl Harbour” lies in cyber-terrorists capability to carry out a cyber-attack that would “paralyze the country”.
So if infrastructure can be compromised to this extent it’s certainly possible that the internet could be disrupted, CNN give four examples of how the internet could go down. And if the internet goes down, then cloud systems aren’t enough. Is it viable then to consider some sort of bank of printed data to back up our digital information? Similar to the theory behind holding gold in the Bank of England to stabilise a currency, could printed, physical documents become the safeguard of the digital information? Digital printing machines can now print vast amounts in short spaces of time for a reasonable cost. Is it time for businesses to print off “core” or essential information every so often and store it safely in a physical environment, so that if anything were to happen to our digital world, we’d have something to cling onto?