Back in action within five days of a serious fire

Case study: University of Southampton - business continuity

At 6am one Sunday last year, a fire broke out in the University of Southampton computer science department.  "The electronics department clean-room facility was a four-storey building fitted with lots vacuum pumps, which fanned the flames" says Joyce Lewis, IT and communications manager at the university.

It went through the whole building in a couple of hours.  By 11am the clean-room building was destroyed, and adjacent buildings and offices seriously damaged. "Everything was inaccessible because it was unsafe or because it had been so severely damaged by smoke and water" says Lewis. One building had to be completely demolished, yet the department was out of action for just five days.

Lewis puts this resilience entirely down to the fact that the university had a comprehensive and well rehearsed business continuity plan. Each year, the University crisis management committee meet and spell out exactly what services are at risk of disaster, how they might be restored, and in what order. People are given clear responsibilities and lines of communication to ensure that the plan is followed through. So, the day of the fire, the crisis management team arranged for all staff and students to be moved into temporary accommodation.

The next stage was to recover internet access and IT systems, to allow students and staff to resume work. The university turned to its remote backup provider which had secure copies of virtually all the University computer data. Within 24 hours, all critical information and applications had been restored.

In three days, students had internet access, and email was restored in six days.

Fortunately, the 45 computer servers in the clean-room building were undamaged, although the loss of network connectivity meant that the operating systems and applications had to be reinstalled from scratch. The servers were then relocated for two weeks in temporary offices until the building was re-opened. The clean room building was demolished after the fire, and a new building will open on the site in late 2008. "We came out of this realising that good policies are essential, and it's vital everyone knows what those plans are" says Lewis. "The only thing that did not go smoothly is that students didn't back up all of their work."

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