Municipal utilities are like the circulatory system of the modern town or city. Without a healthy flow of electrical power, water or gas, parts of our communities cease to function and the well-being of our citizens is put at risk.
DR Redundancy
Needless to say, utility industry providers are mandated to keep their “products” flowing at all times. When an unforeseen shutdown occurs, they are required to work with their municipal stakeholders to restore their service to the greatest number of customers in the shortest possible time.
Delivering their services constitutes the operational system of any utility. Disaster recovery is virtually built into these operational systems in the form of layers of monitoring and redundancy. For example, in the event of a power outage, electrical distributors rely on a grid system of power redistribution, where power from alternate sources can be automatically brought into the area where the outage occurs.
Yet Disaster Recovery Shortfalls Continue
However, outside of their operational systems (which have some ability to self-sense outages), other systems belonging to the utilities – including maintenance, inventory, data collection, billing, customer service, external communications – typically don’t have the same level of redundancies, and may in fact not even have effective recovery scenarios.
It’s not an uncommon occurrence during a power outage to scrounge access to the utility’s website, only to find outdated or patchy information concerning your particular outage. At a time when they need to communicate important information to customers, many utilities are unable to do it.
This is a business continuity problem stemming from a lack of disaster recovery preparation, for which there are no hard statutes or regulations. And this is an area in which utilities in general can and must improve greatly. The good news is that the ISO body of international standards is in the process of developing business continuity guidelines under ISO 22301 that will help all industries, not just utilities, develop more comprehensive Business Continuity Management (BCM).
The Time Is Right For Utilities To Upgrade Their BCM
The reality is that this is a time of transition for utilities regardless of business continuity shortcomings. Many legacy infrastructure systems such as old electrical overhead wires or rusted-out water systems are in the process of being replaced. Add to this mix the relatively recent threat of cyber security or physical terrorist attacks aimed specifically at utilities, threats that need to be addressed. The addition of new technologies and capabilities makes it a perfect time to upgrade disaster recovery systems and business continuity management capabilities at the same time.
Now more than ever, utilities need to come to grips with their business technology resiliency needs in all areas, from call centre operations, to HR and finance, to meter reading, spare parts and plant maintenance.
A document from ISO 22301 sums it up best when it says that BCM is not so much a plan as it is an “ongoing management process requiring competent people working with appropriate support and structures that will perform when needed.”
