Top 5 ways to face a disaster

Just three months into the year, Asia has been hit by a barrage of natural calamities including this week's earthquakes in Indonesia and Dec. 27's Taiwan earthquake which damaged several underwater communications cables. But just how prepared are businesses in dealing with the disruptions?

Taiwan's quake clogged communication links in the region and crippled businesses across Asia. Heavy rains that swept through Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia earlier this year also severely disrupted the operations of many small and midsize businesses located in low-lying areas which are prone to floods.

Disaster struck again Wednesday when two earthquakes, both measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale, hit Indonesian island Padang around noon, killing at least 82 people there.

Several parts of Singapore experienced the tremors, including some 236 commercial and residential buildings located in the northern and central suburbs of the island-state, as well as the CBD (central business district) areas. Business operations were disrupted as employees were evacuated from the affected buildings and some were sent home for the day.

In light of these upheavals, ZDNet Asia spoke with business continuity planning (BCP) specialist Nathaniel Forbes on the importance of preparing for unplanned events that could severely disrupt business. Forbes highlighted the top five key BCP measures businesses should look at to better deal with the unexpected:

1. Be prepared, plan your escape route
If you think that participating in your building's annual fire drill is good preparation for an earthquake, flood or terrorist incident, you're being optimistic. Standing in front of your building once a year whilst sipping a café latté isn't a "drill", it's "theater".

Instead, plan ahead and start a genuine emergency response plan that includes post evacuation and escape maps--and learn the difference between them, at every exit.

Choose an assembly point that's safe--where the building won't fall on you--and develop a system for finding and accounting for your colleagues, without having to use mobile phones.

Train your own fire wardens, and don't count on the Civil Defense. Like public authorities all over the world, they will be overwhelmed in a widespread disaster.

2. Automate your emergency notification system
If your company has a 100 or more employees, type "emergency notification system (ENS)" into a search engine and do your research. Find one that you like and deploy it.

In an emergency, notification 'call trees' will invariably fail. Automation is the key. Unannounced tests conducted at one Singapore company proved that it was able to mobilize 75 people within five minutes of using its automated emergency notification system.

There are Web-based and hardware-based ENS systems, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. The major ENS vendors are starting to extend their focus into Asia so local support will eventually be available. One of the major North American ENS systems was actually developed in Singapore.

3. Cooperate with public emergency authorities
In the West, cooperation between company contingency planners and public emergency authorities is well-established, and it's critical in facilitating efficient response in a disaster. Get to know some cops and firefighters, and join the local security watch group for your building.

In Asia, Singapore has taken a lead in fostering public-private cooperation. For companies in the island-state, you can join the Singapore Police's Security Watch Group for your building, and sign up your company for the Corporate First Responder Scheme (CFRS).

4. Diversify your disruption risks
In Asia, the best you can do to mitigate the threat of voice and data communication disruptions is--and will be--to have service agreements with multiple telco vendors.

You can further mitigate the risk of simultaneous failures by using different vendors for data and voice traffic.

The risk of international communication failures caused by earthquakes and Mother Nature is mitigated, first and foremost, by your telco's participation in more than one undersea cable syndicate. There's not much you can do about that.

5. Practice makes perfect
Recovering from a disaster does have one thing in common with theater--a great performance takes a lot of practice. Whatever preparations you make, exercise them until it hurts.

Run a notification exercise to see how fast you can reach everyone in your company, and activate your IT staff without advance notice to determine how long it really takes to restore your systems.

Get your crisis management team to work at your recovery (or secondary) site for a day. If they can't do it for a day, they sure can't do it for six to eight weeks in an influenza epidemic.