How IT managers and disaster recovery planners can prepare for unpredictable weather.

The weather in the UK is becoming more unpredictable and IT managers and disaster recovery (DR) planners need to keep on their toes to avoid becoming the next unwitting victims of downtime, outages and worse.

Over the past winter, a barrage of flash floods overtook more than 5,000 homes and businesses on the south-western coast.¹ But summer offers no respite; last year, we witnessed flash floods to the south-east, with lightning damaging buildings, rising waters invading homes and businesses, and waterlogged roads leaving people stranded in vehicles.²

by jet stream changes³ – pummelled northern residents with rain, hail, lightning and blustery winds. Dangerous roads and incapacitated travel systems made travel difficult, if not impossible, while widespread power outages left tens of thousands of people without power.⁴

In fact, power outages in the UK last year more than doubled since 2013, according to Eaton’s Blackout Tracker report.⁵ To make the issue worse, the National Grid’s spare electricity capacity is dangerously low, with over a 12 percent shrinkage rate over the course of three years.⁶ While the National Grid is taking precautions to prevent widespread outages, the Ofgem Electricity Capacity Assessment Report 2014 estimates that margins will reach their lowest level in winter 2015-2016 as older power stations are shut down.⁷

Throughout the course of these events, many IT managers and DR planners were forced to demonstrate their ability to work well under pressure when responding to outages caused by severe weather or problems with critical power supply.

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