Last Thursday's power cuts across the east coast of North
America were the first test of the billions of dollars spent on
business continuity plans since the 11 September terror
attacks.
Simon Mingay, research director at Gartner, said, "The power cuts
in the US have proved the value of business continuity planning."
He said, post-11 September, the private and public sectors have
shifted from syndicated business continuity services, which would
not have coped as well with the power cut, to spending money on
creating in-house IT capacity to support the business in the event
of a catastrophe.
This huge investment seems to have paid off. A spokeswoman for
Citigroup, which has its headquarters in New York, said the bank
was able to continue to conduct business, in spite of the power
cuts. "We invoked business continuity plans to minimise the impact
of the power outages in the North East of the US.
"We will continue to monitor the situation and advise clients
accordingly," she said.
Although servers and PCs in the affected cities were down, Vanessa
Evans, sales and marketing manager at Linx, the London Internet
Exchange, said, "Internet traffic levels were not affected."
Since the original concept of the internet was to provide a
resilient communications infrastructure that does not rely on a
central hub, Evans said the internet traffic found another path.