Business recovery plans – a must, but a cost?

This summer, customers of the Irish based Ulster Bank faced 3-4 weeks of problems getting paid and paying bills as the banks payment system failed. Customers had to queue to get cash from their accounts and go to other banks to pay bills- see my post 2 weeks ago about how some countries are limiting the amount that can be paid in cash; these limits would be too low to pay a mortgage in Ireland for most.

When I worked in a paper firm, I was involved in the decision to set up a simple business recovery plan. At the time, I was IT manager at a plant with about €30m turnover and 150 staff. The whole place was more or less run by a single system which managed sales orders, production planning and invoicing. We had a server onsite which done all this. This was not always so, so once I realised we were so dependent on a single piece of hardware/software I initiated a discussion with the plant management board to get a recovery plan in place. To keep it brief the cost of having a server available to us at any location within 4 hours was €7000 per annum. As part of the contract we could also do a free trial run once a year to test how long it would take to recover our systems. I always remember the production manager saying this was a cheap deal as if we had no systems we would basically loose wall customers within a week. And all we did was made cardboard boxes. Surely a bank should have a much better system in place. The cost does not really matter in the decision, it’s much more about the list revenue and lost customers.

The photo by the way comes from a friends Facebook page .