London Flood: Datacentre Resilience Lessons
A London flood shut down most datacentres, but Rackspace stayed online by regularly live-testing failures, proving true resilience comes from …
TL;DR; Many organizations have disaster recovery plans, but these often fail in real situations because critical dependencies are overlooked and not tested end to end. Successful drills can give a false sense of security if they do not include all essential systems, like authentication services. To ensure true resilience, regularly test your recovery process under real conditions and verify that all dependencies are restored and functional.

Everyone has a disaster recovery plan—on paper.
But when the lights go out, very few organisations have systems that actually work. Spain, Portugal, Oracle, Heathrow… these weren’t random outages. They were textbook examples of systems that failed exactly as they were designed.
At Merrill Lynch, I saw it firsthand. Twice. We ran full disaster recovery drills. Everything looked like a success—until we tried to use the restored systems. Nothing worked. Why? Because the one system that everything else relied on—Active Directory—was never restored.
So yes, my app was “restored” successfully. But without authentication, it was useless.
This is the cost of pretending you’re resilient: you run the drills, tick the boxes, declare victory… and miss the critical dependencies that actually matter.
If you’ve never validated that your system works end to end, under real pressure, then you’re not resilient. You’re wishful.
Real resilience doesn’t live in plans. It lives in pain.
Each classification [Concepts, Categories, & Tags] was assigned using AI-powered semantic analysis and scored across relevance, depth, and alignment. Final decisions? Still human. Always traceable. Hover to see how it applies.
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.

Jack Links

Boeing

Healthgrades

Kongsberg Maritime

Ericson

MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd.

Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company)

Schlumberger
CR2

Workday
Boxit Document Solutions

Higher Education Statistics Agency

Alignment Healthcare

ALS Life Sciences

Microsoft

ProgramUtvikling

New Signature

Trayport

Washington Department of Transport

Ghana Police Service

Washington Department of Enterprise Services

New Hampshire Supreme Court

Department of Work and Pensions (UK)

Royal Air Force

New Signature

Boeing

Schlumberger

Epic Games

Qualco

YearUp.org