Disaster Recovery

The devastating floods in Pakistan have affected around 2.5 million people, left over a thousand people dead, untold numbers of people homeless and has left the country facing disease and despair. This might seem like enough to be going on with, but the disaster recovery effort is going to add even more problems.

As well as concentrating on re-homing the people of Pakistan and making sure that food and medicine is available, the government faces the long-term crisis of economic recovery and the re-establishing of telecoms services that will enable businesses to re-start and bring money into the country. As far as disasters go, we’ve only seen the beginning.

Travelling home the other day, I was annoyed by the slow moving traffic – a mere 40 miles an hour on the motorway was enough to set my teeth on edge. Two miles on and the traffic was crawling along at 20mph and the steering wheel had become my anchor to sanity, meaning that while I gripped it in a death grip, I couldn’t pull my hair out. A further mile and I slowed to a stop, anger giving me enough adrenaline that I felt I could pick up my car and run home. That traffic jam lasted just over an hour and the experience left me seething, restless and nearly hairless, as it always does.

Thank God then that I don’t live in China, which is now suffering from a 100km long traffic jam that is entering its ninth day. The traffic jam is on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway and is caused by road works in the capital plus a myriad of small collisions and breakdowns.

Drivers have been playing cards and chess with one another and residents nearby have set up stands to sell food and drink to the beleaguered drivers. 400 police officers are kept at the scene to keep the peace in case it all gets out of hand. Luckily, most of the business people have smartphones so it’s not too much of a disaster – businesses can still be run, family can still be reached and social networking sites can still be updated – phew! Still, next time I’m stuck in traffic, I’ll probably shout and swear like I always do – I’ll just be especially grateful that I don ‘t work in China!

A new gadget for Apple lovers is due to be released in the next months – the iPhone Spy Stick. As well as offering a great disaster recovery solution for the iPhone, the iPhone Spy Stick is also pretty handy for spying on people – i.e. your children or your partner.

What the iPhone Spy Stick does, is recover text messages that have been deleted, calendar appointments, pictures, contacts and GPS coordinates. Basically, it’s a James Bond-worthy gadget that is going to cause more arguments than anything else released this year.

In the form of a USB, the iPhone Spy Stick needs to be connected to a PC as well, in order to work. However, if you want to keep your friends, family and lovers, I’d advise using it merely as a disaster recovery tool for if you happen to have an iPhone as a business mobile!

The list of countries considering a ban on the BlackBerry smartphone grows ever longer. Although Saudi Arabia has reached a tentative agreement with BlackBerry mobile maker RIM, other countries are still jumping on the BlackBerry ban-wagon: the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, India, Indonesia, Lebanon and Algeria.

One of the emerging issues from this sudden surge in BlackBerry concern, is the fact that a lot of business people have BlackBerry’s and a lot of business people travel. So if you are travelling within one of the countries that is considering a ban on BlackBerry’s, how will you continue your business is your mobile suddenly won’t work? The time has come for a good business continuity plan.

As far as disaster recovery efforts go, the BP oil spill has been a bit of a flop in all honesty. Rather than a successful and swift clean up operation, there has been nothing but trial and error and error and error. Now, after a lot of public outrage, the cleanup operation has been taken out of the hands of Mr Tony ‘I-would-like-my-life-back’ Hayward, CEO of BP.

The oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico will instead be handed over to Bob Dudley, the former boss of TNK-BP, BP’s joint venture with Russia.

BP had this to say; “Effective immediately, Bob Dudley has been appointed president and chief executive officer of BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. The new organization will manage all aspects of the response to the Deepwater Horizon incident and the oil and gas spill in the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring that BP fulfils its promises to the people of the Gulf Coast and continues its work to restore the region’s environment.”

Some companies that provide disaster recovery solutions implement a certain strategy that means the top level managers cannot travel together, in case of an accident. Some see this as over-kill, but in reality, it can and does happen.

Today Australia is mourning the loss of the entire board of directors of Sundance Resources, a prominent Australian mining company. The board of directors, mining executives and the billionaire tycoon Ken Talbot were on a twin-engine plane heading towards an iron ore facility between Cameroon and Congo when it went down.

The plane crashed on Saturday in the thick jungle of the Congo. Today, the families of the victims were being comforted while Sundance Resources tried to decide what to do without the whole of its board. Accidents can and do happen – it’s always best to play it safe.

The US Justice Department has said that it is going to take measures to ensure that BP, the oil company involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster off the Gulf of Mexico, has enough money to meet the needs of the cleanup and disaster recovery efforts.

Last night and this morning, BP shares fell around 15.8% - which brings its total market value loss to around £57 billion. President Obama has suggested that Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, should be fired because of his ineptitude and his thoughtless comments, such as complaining that he wants his life back, when eleven workers lost theirs. 44 senators have so far signed a letter demanding that BP stops paying its shareholders, so it has enough money to cover the clean-up effort.

Mind you, bearing in mind that President Obama was the one who let the company drill there when that part of ocean had been protected before, you don’t see him reaching in his pocket do you?

After the ‘Top Kill’ manoeuvre failed to plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, people are beginning to wonder if the disaster is ever going to end. Thousands of gallons of oil are still spurting into the ocean in what is one of the worst man-made disasters and the largest oil spill in U.S.history.

Shares in BP Plc have fallen dramatically since the news hit that federal authorities were opening civil and criminal investigations into the oil spill and the oil company. Undoubtedly, the company will have to pay out compensation for the eleven workers who lost their lives on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Environmentalists are close to boiling point over the fiasco that the oil spill has become – truth be told, it the area that BP were drilling in was always off-limits before Barack Obama and the new President seems to have lost some of his shine over this. A team of researchers has been brought together to try to find a viable way to contain and clean up the spill. Amongst this team of disaster recovery experts is James Cameron, director of award winning film Avatar.