We recently experienced what virtually every one of you has experienced or will definitely have one day –  a total extended broadband failure. We knew it could happen, we even knew when, so we planned for it and our backup plan also had a backup but there is an interesting conversation I had week later with an insurance consultant.

It was simple, we were told fibre was now available from our nearby cabinet.

Knowing how any change can go wrong and confident that BT were capable of outwitting any plan we decided to have it installed on a spare line, OK, we would have two services for a week but we wouldn’t be left broadbandless – or so we thought.

Cutting short a long story, it was installed, failed to work and the engineer was due to come out the day after our original service ceased. No problem stop the original cancellation? This was the bit we didn’t foresee, we couldn’t, it was committed and a fixed action, even a week before the date.

The service was cut off and the engineer sent by the new company appeared next day.Apparently we were mis-sold fibre, we can’t have it, we are 2.4km from the cabinet (we measured 500m to the nearest one but that isn’t the one it seems). We then downgraded to ADSL

Would the cloud have been a good idea?

No!  We have four servers here, we use remote control on our clients computers, we host our own email system, thankfully we aren’t on the cloud otherwise we wouldn’t be working at all, but we have been working normally.

The cloud would have let our other offices communicate with each other but at three times the price of having your own servers it’s not a solution we recommend or use. There are only two people who gain from cloud services, the salesman and the cloud provider. You wouldn’t permanently rent someone else s car, so why permanently rent someone else computer.

Our backup plan to our backup plan.

So we could work in-house as we weren’t dependent on the cloud but as we are so dependent on the internet we had a plan in case it went down, we use Draytek routers which take a USB Dongle, we put in a SIM from Vodafone with a 30Gb capacity for £25 a month. Back up and running again in 3 hours.

So I am talking to an acquaintance at BNI, Daniel Langford from Arthur J Gallagher about business disruption insurance. Apparently companies usually don’t have a disaster plan nor sufficient insurance for business disruption.

Hows it going now?

I sit here in the office 21 days from the fibre go-date with an unusable broadband service awaiting another engineers visit, but its business as usual. We prepare, we plan, we have a backup plan, a disaster plan and that changes a disaster into an inconvenience – What about you? Do you have a backup plan, a disaster plan and finally insurance business disruption cover? We even got our £25 back

• The following are typically covered under a business interruption insurance policy:

  Profits. Profits that would have been earned (based on prior months’ financial statements).
  Fixed Costs. Operating expenses and other costs still being incurred by the property (based on historical costs).
  Temporary Location. Some policies cover the extra expenses for moving to, and operating from, a temporary location.
  Commission & Training Cost. Business Interruption (BI) policy essentially covers the cost of providing training to the operators of the machinery replaced by the insurer following the insured events.
  Extra Expenses. Reimbursement for reasonable expenses (beyond the fixed costs) that allow the business to continue operation while the property is being repaired.
  Civil Authority Ingress / Egress. Government-mandated closure of business premises that directly causes loss of revenue. Examples include forced business closures because of government-issued curfews or street closures related to a covered event.