It wasn’t just your commute that was affected by the tube strikes

Here at DSP when the first set of tubes strikes hit this year only a few of us made it into the office, luckily we are a well prepared company. Using a lot of web based applications and programs so we can all work from home, a coffee shop or even outside if the weather permits.

Being a database and application support company focusing on Oracle Database, E-business suite and Microsoft SQL Server support, making sure all our customer’s databases and applications are available all the time is our number one priority. When the news of the second set of tube strikes hit our office our condolences went out to companies that didn’t have remote support for their databases or applications.

To find out the true affect, we undertook a survey to London based IT departments to see how this affected the availability of their critical business systems. We found in the DSP office that the second set didn’t affect our staff’s attendance as much as the first, we are quite a resilient bunch and we weren’t going to let it defeat us! (But it was probably due to the fact that we’d experienced, learnt and adapted from the first set and able to plan accordingly).

However over 25% of our survey struggled with the attendance of key IT support staff, looking after the sheer volume of databases and applications we do, we know how important it is to have the right people at the right time in case there is any outage or performance issues and to get these resolved within the required SLAs.

Another alarming statistic to come out of our data was the direct affect the Tube Strike had on key applications, with 10% suffering from poor performance or availability. We know how important uptime is hence our company promise of Uptime All the Time, every minute these applications are down they are not only costing money they are also preventing the company performing as they should and therefore not able to bring in revenue.

We did a test not too long ago for one of our customers, a large logistics company, and worked out that every hour their databases were down they were losing £20,000 which is a significant amount and if there staff were affected as well this would affect their SLAs and would have an extremely negative affect on the business.

However the point of the tube strike was not to disrupt our key applications and databases, but to try and save the London Underground ticket offices and the jobs involved. Do we think they were affective? In a word no and guess what over 90% of you agreed with us.

We would love to hear your opinions on the tube strike and how it has affected your Databases or Key applications you can take the survey here or if you are interested in our DBA support you can contact us.