UK safe from internet outages, experts advise
In addition to the disaster recovery measures in place among individual businesses, the improved infrastructure of the internet should ensure that UK enterprises have no need to worry about the type of outage recently witnessed in Asia, experts have claimed.
Millions of people were left without internet access as a result of damaged communications cables at the end of last month, with India, which is home to a large number of outsourced IT operations, among the countries badly hit.
Though it is still unclear what caused the outage - with initial reports of a ship's anchor accidentally snapping one of the undersea cables off the coast of Egypt now being brought into question - UK-based specialists have been quick to dismiss fears that a similar disaster could hit European businesses.
According to Intellect, the trade association for the UK technology industry, while the likes of India and Egypt are situated on the edge of an internet network, 'developed' countries in the West are better protected from outages as "there is an enormous amount of redundancy built in" to their part of the network.
"Clearly, occasionally, you get a major outage due to a server fire or occasionally a cable," explained Stephen Hearnden, director of telecoms and technology at the body.
"But in what we might call the centre of the internet, in the developed countries, there is an enormous amount of redundancy built in - alternative gateways, alternative routing of cables, and clearly the providers of the internet services make sure that they've got full redundancy."
He added that, in the same way email servers occasionally go offline for maintenance but are supported by backup systems, so too do businesses across Western Europe have in place a number of fallback options in the case of a blackout, including the disaster recovery plans adopted by corporations and internet service providers.
Likewise, BT has stated that an incident of the same scale was unlikely to affect the UK due to the more extensive infrastructure in place and the "substantial resilience" of the networks, with back-up plans in place and a number of cables in vulnerable areas doubled-up as an extra precaution.
A spokesman for the firm added, however: "We can't go into any more detail about the network for obvious national security reasons, but the UK is linked to the US and Europe by quite a few sub-sea cables."
In addition, the communications cable industry has been working hard to implement improved disaster-recovery strategies, driven largely by the recent outages caused by the Taiwan earthquake which, according to Ovum analyst David James, acted as a "wake-up call" for the sector.
The main problem, therefore, seems to be on the more local level, with recent research from Gartner revealing that, of those UK, US and Canadian businesses polled, just 60 per cent had disaster recovery plans in place designed to cope with outages of in excess of seven days.
While guarding against fire and flooding was relatively commonplace, worst-case scenarios such as terrorist attacks or pandemics continue to be neglected, the study concluded.
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