A Costly lesson

Large parts of Texas, Florida and Georgia are still recovering from the effects of two hurricanes. Millions of people and businesses remain without electricity, phone service or even access to clean water. Some of these services will take months to restore.

While being without power for a few days is an annoyance for households, for businesses it can be catastrophic.

A friend told me of his business – a wholesale distributor with massive operations in both Texas and Florida – that had been dead in the water (pun intended) for ten days in Texas due to hurricane Harvey, only to have their business in Florida, much of south Georgia, and parts of South Carolina grind to a halt with the arrival of Irma a couple of weeks later.

The main culprit?

Their servers had gone down, due to power outages and flooding, and they were unable to process orders, issue invoices, or check the account status of their customers.

Their warehouse distribution operations were fine once the storm had passed and their trucks were ready to roll. But this was of little use without knowing what products needed to go to what customers. Their efforts at digital disruption had experienced a bit of disruption by Mother Nature.

Just the cost to rebuild after both storms is estimated at over $200 billion, not taking into account lost revenue by business. Nor the scores of lives that were lost, and the pain and frustration of those left to rebuild.

With storms like Harvey and Irma becoming both more frequent and more powerful – and with it more disruptive and costly – many experts turn their eye to our nation’s infrastructure.

How can our cities be made to withstand storms like this better?

How can we harden our power grid, communications networks, and other basic facilities to reduce damage and speed up recovery?

Would underground power lines, like what we find in most of Europe, be a better alternative, despite their high cost?

And how can businesses improve their own IT infrastructure to make it more resilient?

Ironically, the best way for businesses to harden infrastructure may be to simply have less of it.