Ice Storms: 5 Lessons for IT and Telecommuters

When I woke up on Friday, Dec. 12, our house in southeastern New Hampshire was dark. The previous evening an ice storm coated trees, roads and power lines with a layer of ice at least a quarter-inch thick. Tree branches-and whole trunks-snapped, taking vulnerable power lines with them. By Friday morning, with the storm ongoing, blackouts had hit hundreds of thousands of households and businesses in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, including mine.

Power outages are fairly common in our part of the state. In the past year, we have had a dozen or more minor hiccups, resetting electronic clocks and flickering lights. Once a year, we might have an outage that lasts hours. Never before had I seen one that lasted for days.

In the end, the New England Ice Storm of 2008 knocked out power to an estimated 1.25 million people. The impact on businesses has not yet been fully tallied, but-while hotels with power were flooded by residents needing shelter and hardware stores did a brisk business in generator supplies-other companies found themselves shutdown for days to weeks and unable to contact remote workers in the area.

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When I woke up on Friday, Dec. 12, our house in southeastern New Hampshire was dark. The previous evening an ice storm coated trees, roads and power lines with a layer of ice at least a quarter-inch thick. Tree branches-and whole trunks-snapped, taking vulnerable power lines with them. By Friday morning, with the storm ongoing, blackouts had hit hundreds of thousands of households and businesses in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, including mine.

Power outages are fairly common in our part of the state. In the past year, we have had a dozen or more minor hiccups, resetting electronic clocks and flickering lights. Once a year, we might have an outage that lasts hours. Never before had I seen one that lasted for days.

In the end, the New England Ice Storm of 2008 knocked out power to an estimated 1.25 million people. The impact on businesses has not yet been fully tallied, but-while hotels with power were flooded by residents needing shelter and hardware stores did a brisk business in generator supplies-other companies found themselves shutdown for days to weeks and unable to contact remote workers in the area.

"Manufacturers were especially hard hit with shift after shift for days of idle machines followed by unreliable, on and off, power for additional days after area power was restored," says Nancy Jackson, director of the North Central Massachusetts Economic Development Council (NCMEDC). "Their customers complained that these manufacturers, their suppliers, were 'not even answering the phone' when they called about late or absent shipments. They didn't understand that there were no land lines for e-mail and telephone communication!"

Nano-materials startup Nanocomp, based near Concord, NH, lost power for six days. To the company's customers, the firm essentially disappeared, says Peter Antoinette, president and CEO.

"We were completely out of business for that period of time," he says. "No phones. No Internet. Basically, to the outside world, we disappeared."

Here's five lessons any IT pro or telecommuter can take away from the storm.

1. Scope out back-up power for necessary systems

Businesses need to ask themselves a simple question, says Steve Hilton, VPof enterprise and SMB research for the Yankee Group, a business intelligence firm.

"How much will an hour, a day, or a week without connectivity or power cost their businesses?" he says. "This simple question puts some boundaries around the need for and scale of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning."

For some, the answer will be a complex mix of off-site data centers, quarterly catastrophe simulations and duplication of critical business applications, Hilton says. For others, a few extra cell phones and a power generator from Home Depot will do the trick.

For a telecommuter, a generator suits just fine. However, for a manufacturer, the equation looks much different. At Nanocomp, management is still mulling whether the risk of another storm is worth spending needed cash reserves on backup systems.