23 July 2007

Flood-zone security suppliers confident of business continuity

SA Mathieson

Floods in York earlier this summer

Users of IT security products should see no gaps in service resulting from floods in Britain, despite the location of several vendors in some of the worst-affected towns.

There are infosecurity service providers in Gloucester, Abingdon in Oxfordshire and Oxford itself. On 23 July, the UK Environment Agency had severe flood warnings in place for the stretches of river running through all three towns, its highest level of alert indicating imminent danger to life and property.

Counties including Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire experienced as much as three times the usual monthly rainfall on 20 July, leading to swollen rivers and severe flooding across southern England and the Midlands. They follow similar floods in northern England a few weeks previously.

But MessageLabs, which has its global headquarters in Gloucester – one of the worst affected towns – said its services would not be affected. In a statement, it said it has “multiple redundancies, plans and procedures in place to ensure that we are always prepared for any situation”.

“The Gloucestershire area is badly impacted by the recent adverse weather conditions, however MessageLabs will continue to operate as usual without any disruption to our services or support. Where needed, our Gloucester area staff will be working in different locations until the situation rectifies itself.”

It added that it operates 14 data centres around the world, which can distribute the work of processing data for clients if any sites are unavailable. “In the situation where a client’s infrastructure is affected by these adverse weather conditions, they would have some peace of mind knowing that their email will automatically be spooled by MessageLabs for up to seven days and forwarded to them once they were up and running again,” the firm added.

Sophos, in Abingdon, had a similar message. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant, said the firm’s headquarters is a little way north-east of the flooded town centre, that most staff reported to work on 23 July “albeit some by circuitous routes,” teleworking is in place for key employees – and very few staff and equipment sit on the office’s ground floor.

He added: “If the situation gets worse in the next 24 hours and Sophos is flooded then there will not be an impact on our customers. We have global tech support teams and analyst labs based around the world who produce updates for our anti-virus and anti-spam products, and so there would be no interruption to service.” The Environment Agency expected the Thames at Abingdon to peak on 24 July.

Database security vendor Secerno is based on the main road west out of Oxford, which was closed until further notice on 22 July due to risk of flooding. Chief operating officer Paul Davie said the office – located, with the firm’s equipment, on the second floor of an office block – is however outside the police cordon, and again remote working arrangements are in place, with all staff having encrypted laptops. “We’ve had a few exciting personal dramas over the weekend but in our case we have minimal business disruption because of the way we are set up,” he said.

Kaspersky Labs’ UK base in Culham near Abingdon was unaffected. Senior technology consultant David Emm said everything internally was working normally, and that customers are anyway not provided with updates from servers in Britain.

Telecoms giant BT, which provides disaster recovery services, says its emergency response teams have been deployed in the flood areas. “Today, they are working their socks off,” said John Madelin, head of UK security practice for BT. He added that many clients had taken advice on environmental risks such as flooding using Rasor, an in-house tool used by BT to evaluate dangers to its facilities.

Madelin added that despite the publicity gained by terrorism, more than a third of such disasters are naturally-caused. “We know environmental impact is significant,” he said. “You can expect it regularly, and you can expect it will have a severe impact.”

One in five British companies without business continuity plan (21 Feb 2007)

Disaster recovery feature: Staying power (July/August 2006 issue)

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