Last month in advance of a seminar on Work Area Recovery for the BCI London Forum, I conducted a survey of London area Business Continuity Institute members. The seminar was a sell out. It seems that a lot of companies are re-evaluating their strategy for coping with denial of access to their building (usually through fire or flood) or some other melt down that requires staff to work in alternate locations. Companies like SunGard, ICM and IBM must be seeing a decline in traditional outsourced work area recovery where those companies’ sites are kept on standby for customers in the event of ….
Two factors seem to lie at the root of that decline.
- Much closer scrutiny of costs in the past two years caused all budgets to be reviewed for value for money.
- The increase in home working and hot desking have obviated the need for traditional office environments.
The biggest concern in the survey regarding home working was network load – network traffic at the last mile and in the server room. I can’t help but think that capacity will rise as demand increases to a point where, if disaster strikes, provided it doesn’t affect everyone (in which case, our problems are bigger than our businesses) and provided the company has mirrored IT, there will be sufficient bandwidth at both ends to cope with spikes.
