“The most successful people are those who are good at plan B”
- James York, Mathematician 11/8/2005.

James York, the famous mathematician who first coined the phrase ‘Chaos Theory’ in 1974 to explain ripple phenomenon, first said this now famous quote whilst speaking about Chaos Theory in 2005, but has repeated it many times since. It’s now more famous for its motivational message than its direct relevance to Chaos theory but in these volatile times has a strong resonance for business people.

Disasters are often thought of as a remote and uncontrollable risk, but Chaos theory explains how such seemingly random events actually have their route in small predictable causes.

Recent disasters like the BP Deep Water Horizon Oil rig explosion, and nearer to home the fire this year at BT’s aptly named ‘Burne House’ telecoms exchange in Paddington vividly illustrate how small predictable causes can quickly multiply up to rapidly produce a seemingly random and unconnected disaster.

We all know such events do happen. The BP Deep Water Horizon Oil rig explosion must have seemed like a remote risk before June. Now with the benefit of some hindsight it looks like it was the culmination of a number of unconnected causes which individually would not have been anything like such a problem, but when they coincided, multiplied up to produce a catastrophe.

Similarly the loss of BT’s main exchange in Paddington earlier this year which cut off thousands of businesses across the UK from their phones and internet connections was caused by a main’s water pipe leak away from the building producing a flood and subsequent fire.

The Deep Water Horizon explosion put BP under incredible strain, but what nearly destroyed the business was the way they were perceived as handling the situation. Interestingly, companies effected by the BT outage who were able to take control of the hand they were dealt, not only minimised their actual loss of business but came out looking more professional as a result, turning a near disaster into something positive.

James York argues that in every walk of life the most successful people are those that prepare and are ready with a plan B.  Given that IT systems are at the heart of all modern businesses and their loss can bring a company to a grinding halt, it’s important that all successful business people in our ‘always on’, interconnected, immediate information world, must all be good at plan B and particularly good at a plan B for IT systems.

When it comes to being good at plan B it’s also worth just reflecting on another very recent disaster - the October Tsunami in Indonesia this year which killed 40 people. This Tsunami was again a complete surprise because the early warning buoys that were put in place after the 2004 Boxing day Tsunami, didn’t function. They didn’t function for a number of reasons but the key lesson is that because they were never tested, no one knew they wouldn’t work at the critical moment.

So not only should we be good at plan B, we should test our plan B continually to make sure it will do what we need in the event the worst does happen.

At Plan B Disaster Recovery, we specialise in IT recovery for critical Windows servers. We believe that IT recoveries should work when you need them - no questions. So, we not only do everything to make our customers systems work on our recovery servers in advance of any problems, we automate the process and then test every recovery server for every customer every day. As a result we can make sure our customers will be good at their IT disaster plan B - in fact we guarantee it with the promise that if our customers don’t  have their recovery servers up, running  and ready to do work in twice the number of minutes they usually take, then we will pay them back all their fees for the last year!

Plan B customer’s that were effected by BT’s Paddington exchange outage in March were able to switch on their Plan B recovery servers in minutes and carry on working without any significant interruption - As one customer put it “That was the least stressful disaster I’ve ever had!”.

At Plan B we are good at making sure our customers are good at plan B for their IT, and because of our technology we are also very cost effective. So if you’d rather not just hope disasters wont happen, why not consider what Plan B can do to keep you working when your competitors aren’t?

If you’d like to know more or get a simple quote for your own systems why not contact us?