City firms ignore bird flu threat

Over half of firms surveyed by Datamonitor have no bird flu business continuity plans in place

The recent outbreak of bird flu may have thankfully been confined to the poultry population of one farm in Suffolk, but according to a survey out today a surprisingly large number of City firms have no plans in place for dealing with a human pandemic.

The survey of over 100 IT directors at City-based financial services from research firm Datamonitor found that over half had no business continuity plans in place to cope with a pandemic.

While the limited risk posed by avian flu to the human population may mean some firms have decided specific plans to cope with a pandemic are unnecessary the survey also revealed a lax attitude to other, more commonplace threats.

A fifth of firms said there were no plans to maintain business operations in the event of a fire, while over a third admitted to no plans for coping with a major IT failure. Almost half of respondents said they had not planned how they would operate in the event of their normal working site being unavailable.

The survey found that while banks tended to have a more robust business continuity plan in place brokers and traders were at greater risk with 55 percent having no business continuity plan for responding to a fire and half having no plan in place for coping in the wake of a terrorist attack.

Ian Bevington, vertical marketing specialist at communications services specialist Mitel, which commissioned the report said in a statement that the financial services sector was guilty of an unacceptably lax approach to business continuity.

“The financial services sector… should be leading the way [on business continuity planning] because of the very nature of their business and importance to the economy," he said. "They must have plans in place to deal with a potential disaster, or face the very real prospect of severe financial losses."