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East Coast power cuts shouldn't be termed a disaster
These things should bring out the best in people - and the best in business planning...

By silicon.com

Published: Monday 18 August 2003

Let's hope that by Monday morning the power cut in the US seems distant. That's often the way with such events and once email, lighting and everything else is up and running, a few weeks on people have a tendency to forget anything was ever wrong.

The 'outage' along highly populated parts of the US and Canadian east coast has led to two major questions. First, people want to know if it was related to terrorist activity - and the official response is a resounding 'No' - and second, there are concerns it is because of the MSBlast worm.

Security experts seem to have ruled out the latter explanation. One even went so far as to say: "not even Homer Simpson would run a power station on a Windows operating system."

Remember, these things do just happen (and, most famously, in the New York area on one night in the late 1970s - with a consequent spike in births nine months later).

But there is no reason not to try to learn from the experience. One report, all about New York being plunged into darkness, quoted worried commuters likening the experience to the downing of communications during and for a while after the 11 September terrorist attacks. At that time, very few service providers were blatant enough to use the tragic events as an opportunity to sell - whether that was selling disaster recovery, wireless or other services.

Not so the outage of 2003. Disaster recovery and business continuity firms have been rallying to point out that a power cut shouldn't just entail a shrug of the shoulders. With the right planning and oil powered generators, critical systems can be kept up. It should also go without saying that mirrored back-ups should be kept at alternative sites, for any disaster that sees premises damage.

We will get to hear what exactly caused the outage. We almost certainly won't hear about the thousands of well run companies that have properly planned for such eventualities.