Northgate Information Solutions, which lost its UK
headquarters in the Buncefield oil terminal fire, has highlighted
difficulties in quickly establishing telecoms connections as a
factor in delays in restoring full IT services to its
customers.
The company's chief executive, Chris Stone, made the disclosure
as he issued a robust defence of the firm's disaster recovery
planning, which he said was "way ahead" of most organisations.
The company, which provides IT services to Tesco, Manchester
United, the Labour Party and local authorities, lost its datacentre
hosting customer IT systems in the explosion on 11 December.
Stone said Northgate's recovery operations were held back by the
difficulties telecoms suppliers BT, Neos Networks and Cable &
Wireless faced in rapidly providing sufficient connections to link
its customers to a back-up datacentre. "This was not a Northgate
problem, it was a supplier problem," he said.
Northgate invoked its business continuity plan, and began
rebuilding customers' servers at a Sungard emergency datacentre
within hours of the explosion.
Stone, who praised the work of the telcos, said they had
struggled to provide data links quickly enough to allow Northgate
to fully restore services as rapidly as it had hoped. "All
customers were live and running very quickly, but on a limited
basis, simply because of practical difficulties in quickly
obtaining connections," he said.
"Well over half the customers are back to where they were before
the explosion. For others, it is still a question of giving them
the connections they need. We understand it is a question of time,"
he said.
Northgate ran into difficulties after the explosion damaged the
datacentre and back-up datacentre, multiple back-up power supplies
and three independent communications systems held in different
wings of the building.
Stone defended the strength of the company's disaster recovery
planning, which he said had a level of sophistication and detail
that went beyond that of most other organisations.
Stone said BT, Cable & Wireless and Neos Networks had made
enormous efforts to resolve Northgate's issues.
BT and Cable & Wireless declined to comment.