Not All Business Disasters Are Caused By Nature – Technology Failure Causes Its Fair Share

Many people in business are under the mistaken impression that the default setting of a disaster is a naturally occurring one. Some companies go under because they are unprepared to face downtime due to technical reasons in their organizations. Let us look at a few of the technical reasons that affect production.

Personnel

However automated a business set-up is, the very core always needs humans. Some of the staff will be critical for day to day operations to proceed smoothly. If a business has not prepared for a day when something happens to critical personnel resulting in incapacitation or death, then the business can faced long production downtimes, economic loss and if they do not have deep pockets, the business may go under. Oftentimes IT personnel know what to do if a server goes down, there is a DOS attack, if malware or virus etc affect the network. They can work to restore normality. What happens if these critical personnel leave or are not available during a crisis. Production may be hit significantly.

All it required was a bit of forethought wherein the organization had a clear cut chain of command plus procedures spelled out. The disruption would be minimal in spite of non-availability of critical personnel.

Equipment Failure

In today’s highly automated data driven state of the art technology, human intervention is limited to the inputs. All calculations or other functions are automated and in the “set and forget mode” most of the time, things will hum smoothly. Sooner or later Murphy’s Law “If anything can go wrong it will” is bound to affect the business and when equipment is non-functional, if there is no back-up you are looking at major financial implications. Upper management may take a dim view of the lack of planning.

A little bit of planning for such an eventuality would have made the situation easy to recover from. There should be a back-up plan for equipment failure.

Power Outage

A power outage could significantly affect production. UPS can keep things going for a limited time. However, without a backup production will be hampered and eventually stop.

If, on the other hand, power needed for critical operations to continue had been assessed, then back-up power could have been installed. This would have kept critical operations functional and disruptions to a minimum.

Therefore disasters are not only natural but can be due to technical or man-made reasons too.