Incredible undersea cable scenario

You'd be laughed out of the room if you made up this scenario for a tabletop exercise:

At 08:00 on Wednesday morning January 30, two ships 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) apart in the Mediterranean drop their anchors in stormy weather off Alexandria, Egypt, and Marseilles, France, at the same time. They both manage to drop their anchors directly onto two separate undersea cables buried 50 centimeters in the sand, each roughly the diameter of your wrist.

The two cables carry 75 percent of network traffic in the Middle East and South Asia. Your business in India or Egypt loses over half its international data and voice network capacity.

Two days later on Friday morning, February 1, a third cable is severed by an abandoned anchor embedded in the sea floor off the coast of Dubai, also 2,500 kilometers (1600 miles) from Alexandria, but in a different direction. That cable is owned by the Indian company that also owns one of the cables broken earlier. It is not clear how an abandoned anchor could sever a stationary cable.

Your voice and data networks are now crawling at just 25 percent of capacity. A spokesman for your business in India or Egypt calls it a "national disaster".

Then two days later on Sunday Feb. 3, a fourth cable goes down, this time between the UAE and Qatar, from a power failure. Egypt's Ministry of Communications announces, after a review of video footage, that the first cable break off Alexandria was not caused by a ship's anchor, but offers no other explanation.

Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have a field day. You throw up your hands, wondering if a plague of locusts is coming next.

To see where all these cables are, check out the cable maps published by Telegeography Research.

BCP blueprint
It doesn't matter, for planning purposes, if the causes of the breaks turn out to be entirely different than what we now believe. There were ruptures, and they caused very real business impact across about a third of the planet. So there are useful lessons for contingency planners:

• There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent a communication outage caused by an undersea cable break. There is little the companies and consortia that own the cables can do, either.

• There is very little most companies can do to mitigate the risk of loss of wide area communication. You probably rely on your telco or Internet service provider (ISP) to have--or to be able to make quickly--agreements with multiple circuit providers (fiber optic cable, satellite) if a wide area circuit fails.

• Worse still, for most companies there is no short-term recovery strategy for loss of undersea communication cables. The frequency of failures is far too low, the duration too short and the impact too hard to quantify and justify the cost of installing alternative channels. Even the telcos don't do it; they just lease capacity on multiple cables. Most companies can't do that. You just accept the risk, and pray.

• You can mitigate "last mile risk" from your telco switching center to your office PABX, perhaps, by having cables to your office through separate riser ducts on opposite sides of your building, or by having a recovery site some distance away served by another telco. In many countries there is only one telco, and even having circuits from separate local telco's won't provide redundancy if they use the same utility conduits.

• A risk assessment for any business that depends on Internet access should assume there is a risk of loss or impairment of that access from events that occur, literally, on the other side of the world.

• There is no common understanding of "dependence," and so business impact is hard to assess. If the marketing department uses e-mail to send proposals or uses the Internet to conduct webinars, do the company's sales depend on Internet access? If customer service runs a self-service support Web site with a list of FAQs and a "Contact Us" button, do the company's customer relations depend on Internet access? If accounting uses Citrix to execute the general ledger, accounts payable or accounts receivable remotely, do the company's finances depend on Internet access?

• Based on historical evidence, two weeks is the minimum recovery time objective (RTO) for repair of an undersea cable. Watch this short animation of the repair process from Renesys to understand the challenges of picking up a 70 millimeter (3-inch) cable off the ocean floor in a storm. It took seven weeks to repair the cables damaged by the Hengchun earthquake in the Taiwan Strait last year. So if you're running a call center in India, for example, you should plan to operate with impaired capacity for at least two weeks, probably longer.

Agent Fox Mulder, from former hit series The X Files said it best: "The truth is out there."

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Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society’s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII’s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.