Recent events have propelled disaster recovery and business continuity to the front of mind. A chum's misfortune in having his back-up disk nicked along with his briefcase and laptop, ouch, has caused some personal reflection about the best form of off-site backup for all those gigabytes of information and images that one accumulates at home.
It's not much fun thinking about theft, fire, floods and other horrible happenings, but on a wider industry scale the fall-out from the collapse of BemroseBooth has illustrated the vital nature of such deliberations.
The worth of having a proper plan in place was amply demonstrated by news that Business Continuity in Northampton was able to swing into immediate action for Home Retail Group and resume printing its bills and statements just a couple of days after BemroseBooth's failure. I had an illuminating and entertaining chat with Business Continuity's Danny Brock this morning as I was interested to know what they do when they're not dealing with someone else's disaster - the Home Retail work being its first 'real' job in 17 months. The answer is test, test and test again.
While I'm not privy to the details of BemroseBooth's entire client list, I would wager a pound or two that John Lewis was also among the customers affected as I received a letter from the retailer a couple of weeks back apologising because "our supplier of Partnership Card vouchers has closed down its production without notice and this has affected our supply of vouchers... we will be unable to issue Partnership Card vouchers for June". The vouchers in question are a pretty specialist, complex piece because a secure gift voucher is incorporated in a letter. Whether it was possible to have a standby solution for such a thing I don't know, but having to send thousands of letters of apology to customers will surely go down like a rat sandwich at John Lewis Towers.
The BemroseBooth debacle has shown that disaster recovery planning need to be more than a tick box exercise, and I imagine it may well have resulted in a few people reviewing and reassessing the robustness of their plans. At least, I hope it has.
