When the IT goes down for whatever reason
Back in the day i.e. some 7+ years ago or more, when I was a civil servant and therefore before I retired, one of my jobs was to try to keep a local business continuity plan (BCP) in place and up to date. It helped guide us through what to do when disaster struck – fire, flood, utilities down (water, gas electric), terrorism, local/national IT problems etc. etc.
My thoughts went back to those days when I walked into my local Co-Op and saw significantly empty shelves caused by their IT systems being hijacked, as indeed has also happened to M&S.
I started to wonder what the BCP’s look like for the data/IT/distribution centres of big national retailers? Do they have/is it possible for them to have back up traditional manual stock systems? Surely, being able to reasonably quickly revert to the old way of doing things has to be firmly in the mind of business planners as hijackings by criminals/rogue or enemy states must be expected on all but a daily basis.
Yes, keep updating the IT security to try to make your systems are as inaccessible as possible, but also plan for the fact that breaches, with far reaching consequences, will happen. Take all your staff, particularly frontline staff in shops, through what the back-up systems are, how to do a daily manual stock-take and phone through requirements each day to try to keep the shelves as full as possible. This is particularly an issue, I assume, with food retail.
I wonder how seriously both having a BCP and most importantly keeping it up to date are taken? It’s no use turning to it in times of crisis only to find that it was last updated some years ago and no one can remember when the last run through of it took place. Oh that was when Mary was in charge but she left 3 years ago. I think you get my drift here.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to suggest that the Co-Op’s BCP’s (or for that matter M&S) weren’t up to scratch, they could well have been and hopefully were, but the longer a business can’t fully function following a crisis the less robust the continuity planning. Well that was my way of looking at the process.
I think we can take it as read that their BCPs were inadequate and are under review. I worry that we are going so far down the road of an all electric, all internet model that a power failure like the one in Spain would cause serious and widespread problems. Spain were very fortunate to get their grid back on in 24hrs. A major grid failure here could easily take several days to resolve. Just think about that for a moment...
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