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Revealed: Strangest business tech emergencies
Old bombs, burning bins and blocked toilets cause trouble

By Steve Ranger

Published: Friday 27 April 2007

Unexploded bombs, blocked sewers and burning wheelie bins are just some of the strange incidents that have forced companies to activate their business continuity plans.

World War II bombs discovered in a nearby building site caused one company to evacuate all staff, while another was forced to implement disaster recovery after a cleaner unplugged the main server to use a vacuum cleaner, according to a 2006 study of its customers by SunGard Availability Services.

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In another incident a sewage blockage rendered toilets inoperable forcing the customer to invoke the SunGard disaster recovery services. Local youths setting fire to a wheelie bin - which meant employees at a firm couldn't get into their building - forced another invocation, while another business was forced to act after the theft of PCs and servers from its office.

Hardware failure, however, was still the leading cause of business disruption - responsible for almost half (48 per cent) of SunGard's customers' invocations.

But problems resulting from disruptions to power supplies also rocketed - accounting for more than one-quarter (26 per cent) of customer disaster invocations, up from seven per cent in 2005.

Flooding and infrastructure-related problems, such as air conditioning faults and failure of uninterrupted power supply systems, were the third biggest cause of business disruption.

SunGard Availability Services UK managing director, Keith Tilley, said no matter how trivial the cause, an outage can have potentially serious consequences for the business - particularly if the system in question is supporting a customer-facing website or a contact centre.

And with IT equipment drawing more power than ever, it is imperative businesses plan around possible interruptions to their power supply, he warned.