Floods and Resilience
Reducing the impact of a flood
We often advise clients that the risks presented by climate change are increasing rapidly. For any organisation that has assets exposed to flooding, sea level rise or storms, mitigating these risks can be challenging. Here are a couple of success stories.
In May 2010, a major flood hit Coca-Cola’s 30,000 m2 bottling plant in Nashville, Tennessee. The facility is located in a high hazard, 100 year flood zone.
The flooded bottling facility during the 2010 flood which prompted the flood mitigation project.
Coca-Cola partnered with FM Global to develop a plan to protect their facility from future floods.
They decided they could not relocate the very large warehouse away from a known flood risk, so they developed a method to reduce the impact of the next inevitable flood. They protected critical production equipment within the facility using flood walls. This enabled them to let the flood waters flow into, and out of, the building.
Flood wall around the critical infrastructure and the flood door to allow the water to flow back out of the building.
Amazingly, they were able to verify the effectiveness of the solution during another serious flood in March 2021. See here for more details: https://www.fm.com/insights/coca-cola
Interestingly, the Reject Shop 26,000 m2 Distribution Centre in Ipswich, Queensland had a very similar experience. After the extensive flooding at the start of 2011, they installed a floodbarrier system around the DC. Again, they had the opportunity to test the barrier when another flood hit the area in 2013. There was no impact to the DC’s operations!
Resilience in the Cloud
The Uptime Institute recently published an excellent paper on the topic of the cost and benefits of purchasing increased resilience from cloud providers, using AWS as a case study. The baseline comparison was a system with no resilience installed. The study shows the cost of the increased resilience and the associated reduced downtime.
The author provides some wise advice:
"Unlike privately owned and co-located data centres, customers using the public cloud have no visibility or control over the datacentre used by their cloud provider. When architecting a cloud application, it is up to software developers to incorporate resiliency into their application architecture. Conversely, in amore traditional non-cloud application, data centre teams, infrastructure engineers and software developers should work together to meet resiliency requirements.”
"If customers use more resources to architect resiliency, they need to pay for those additional resources. The implication is that resiliency is neither included as standard nor guaranteed. Customers should design their applications to meet availability requirements and balance this objective against the cost."
As CIO’s are relinquishing control over the operation of their IT systems, it is imperative that the resilience requirements of each application and its data are fully specified in the service agreement with the cloud provider. APRA’s standard soon to come into effect, CPS 230, addresses many of the issues associated with outsourcing critical services to Third Parties. Source: https://intelligence.uptimeinstitute.com/resource/cloud-availability-comes-price
Battle ahead for EU’s 750-bn-euro recovery plan | EDN Hub
If passed, the proposal would be the biggest EU stimulus package in history and could see Europe-wide taxes on plastics and big tech introduced in a major advance for European integration. “This is Europe’s moment,” Von der Leyen told a session of the European Parliament as she announced the plan.
Business Resilience-as-a-Service
Now available
Business Resilience-as-a-Service
The ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to sudden disruptions in your business requires a combination of preventative control and mindful action. We have long subscribed to the benefits of addressing business resilience as an ongoing Program rather than a one off 'project'.
Improving your business resilience requires planning, monitoring and effectively responding to crises and should be improved over time. Equally, staff skills require on-going improvement through training and exercising.
This is more than just Business Continuity.
Our new Business Resilience-as-a-Service offering will help your business develop a business resilience Program that includes:
- Developing a Policy and governance arrangements
- Developing, reviewing or enhancing your Business Continuity and Crisis Management Plans
- Integrating with other recovery plans
- Training and exercising staff
Need to justify your investment?
We have developed a calculator to assist in the development of a business case for an investment in Business Resilience-as-a-Service. The calculator quantifies the financial impact of an outage on the organisation’s revenues. For many organisations, the ability to recover one or two days faster in a given year, will pay for the annual cost of the Program – yielding an excellent return on investment.
Interested in finding out more?
Send us an email via the link below or call us on 03 9016 9036.
Resources
Check out our other articles on business resilience and this excellent publication: Organisational Resilience by the Cranfield School of Management and the BSI.
Textile and garment supply chains in times of COVID-19: challenges for developing countries | UNCTAD
Given its non-essential nature, the fashion industry faces significant risks. Indeed, in times of COVID-19, as consumers around the world remain in lockdown, they no longer need new products. This industry is characterised by a highly integrated global supply chain. In it, many developing countries play the role of the supplier of low-cost inputs. This article highlights some of challenges and concerns that some of these countries face, many of which are dependent on textile and garment exports.
FERMA calls for EU Resilience Framework for Catastrophic Risks | FERMA
There is currently little to no insurance coverage available for financial losses in case of catastrophic risks, such as the current COVID19 pandemic. The resilience framework would have the flexibility to respond to a range of catastrophic events, such as pandemic and massive cyber-attacks, that can create severe business losses without physical damage.
BCI Coronavirus Organizational Preparedness Report - 6th Edition
"Many organisations have told us that they are now regularly reviewing the business continuity plans of suppliers as suppliers’ plans – rather like their own – are having to adopt a degree of agility to cope with the unknown progression of the virus.”
"Organisations are increasingly looking towards the sustainability of their plans: 60.7% have now reviewed their BIAs to reflect changing priorities given the sustained impact of the pandemic, a substantial rise on the 53.5% reported only two weeks ago."
Download the report here
Emerging security challenges organisations should be aware of as lockdowns relax | International SOS
Experiencing an exponential rise of COVID-19 related security cases during the pandemic, International SOS sheds light on three emerging security challenges. These are alongside underlying security issues that the pandemic environment has and will continue to exacerbate.
Coronavirus era puts resilience of supply chains ‘front and centre’ warns Kellogg | Food Navigator
The latest EY attractiveness survey - which examines the performance and perceptions of European countries as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI), revealed that post-COVID-19 there will be an additional lens front and centre: the need to juggle cost and resiliency.
Climate change risks to Australian Businesses | Ben Scheltus for the RMIA The risk magazine
When doing your Risk Assessments, please be mindful of the physical and transition risks presented by climate change. For three years in a row, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report (GRR) has called out the risks we collectively face from climate change. In the 2019 report published in February, climate change and environmental risks dominate the “high likelihood” and “high impact” quadrant of the global risk matrix. Read the article here.
Click here to view the RMIA Risk Magazine April edition. Please note the magazine is for RMIA members only.
The future of technology in business continuity - three things to think about
Continual rapid developments in technology and the subsequent impacts on society bring business continuity challenges and opportunities. In this article, Charlie Boffin, CEO of ClearView, explores the subject.
2017 FM Global Resilience Index | Continuity Central
The 2017 FM Global Resilience Index has been published. The annual index, which is online and interactive, ranks 130 countries and territories by their enterprise resilience to disruptive events. Now in its fourth year, the index provides a unique resource to help business executives site facilities, select suppliers, evaluate established supply chains and identify customers who may be vulnerable.
Users of the index can now investigate 12 quantified resilience drivers related to each country’s economic strength, risk quality and supply chain condition. The index also ranks countries for overall enterprise resilience.
Switzerland occupies the number-one ranking, reflecting high scores for its infrastructure, local supplier quality, political stability, control of corruption and economic productivity. Haiti ranks at the bottom of the index due in part to its high natural hazard exposure and poor economic conditions.
How to Conduct a Business Impact Analysis for Disaster Recovery
SmartData Collective | June 10
Your disaster recovery strategy needs to be pretty comprehensive. It’s not just about making sure that your backup is viable. There’s an entire strategy that needs to be put in place and that means identifying the roles of your employees and establishing an action plan. But how do you know what to do unless you have some idea of how the business will be impacted?
AWS redundancy, DR set up no piece of cake
TechTarget | June 9
Before the cloud era, only a few organizations -- generally the biggest and best-funded -- could afford to have a second data center for business continuity or disaster recovery. The costs of hardware, space and personnel were too prohibitive for others.
With the cloud, however, adding capacity is relatively easy and dramatically less expensive. With multiple cloud locations and AWS availability zones, enterprises have the ability to build applications that can be more scalable and available than tradition on-premises apps. However, turning AWS redundancy into a fully functioning secondary off-site data center is not necessarily easy.
Business continuity training should happen first day on the job: World Conference on Disaster Management speaker
Everyone needs to be trained in business continuity management, and the importance of managing expectations is one lesson learned during the major floods in 2013 in southern Alberta, speakers suggested Tuesday at the World Conference on Disaster Management.
