Biggest Business Disasters List Comes With Built-in Surprises

A new list of the biggest business disasters of the last 12 months contains plenty of the unexpected, as well as some surprise entries that demonstrate that serious business disruptions can come from a wide range of sources.

What do two burst pipes, three fires, three storms, one power cut and a bridge failure have in common? Give up? They’ve all threatened UK business in the last year with severe disruption, according to new research by business continuity experts IT Specialists (ITS).

The company looked at incidents which caused significant issues for UK businesses ahead of the Business Continuity Institute’s Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) 2016, 16-20 May.

Although the damage caused by the three worst storms (Katie, Abigail and Desmond) of this last winter was extreme – affecting more than a quarter of a million (280,000) UK homes combined and leaving billions of pounds of damage in their wake – less cataclysmic events were also incredibly disruptive. For example, major fire incidents left a combined 7,000 homes without power in the last year alone. Interestingly, considerable disruption was caused by far less obvious issues, such as a 19-day closure to the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland and the even more mundane burst pipe.

One of the latter knocked out power to the Royal Berkshire Hospital’s A&E department, leaving medical staff using head torches, while a burst water main in Kennington inundated a major junction in central London with up to 0.5 m of water.

Whether man-made or natural, flooding is the most expensive and prevalent issue to affect the UK, perhaps unsurprisingly given the geography and the weather, but the cost is surprising indeed. Accountancy firm KPMG has estimated that the total cost to the UK’s insurance sector, businesses, individuals, communities and government as a result of winter 2015/16 flooding will top out at between £5-5.8bn.

However, at least some of these costs can be avoided by businesses with a solid business continuity strategy. Without this in place, there is a risk of negative consequences such as lost inventory, reduced productivity due to employees being unable to work remotely, property damage and the all-important revenue loss.

“Investing in forward planning can save valuable time, protect the organisation’s revenue and preserve its customer base,” said Matt Kingswood, UK head of ITS, which provides business continuity solutions, including a disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution, BlackVault Managed Recovery Platform.

“We urge businesses to formulate a business continuity programme to identify inefficient processes that cost the organisation money on a daily basis and can prove a barrier to disaster recovery.”

The full list of 10 business disasters is below.

Top 10 business continuity disasters