Are East Africa’s CIO’s ready for El Nino?

Following local and international climate experts’ warning that the looming El Niño will rival the strongest ever recorded, authorities all around East Africa are bracing themselves and preparing their people for the worst.

For Uganda, the military has been drafted into the disaster preparedness policy. In Kenya, local governments are adjusting their budgets ahead of the much-feared rains that may start anytime soon.

The word El Niño is well remembered in East African because of the 1997-1998  mark it left on the lives of the communities that lost loved ones during those floods that destroyed property worth billions.

El Niño is now dominating so many communities preparations for the wet season. A TV station in Nairobi last weekend dedicated a whole programme to praying for the terrible rains not to harm “God’s People.”

It is no surprise this time that in Kenya, Deputy President William Ruto said in September that the government is working on a plan to relocate people living in flood and mudslide prone areas to safer grounds before the dreadful El Niño starts.

In Uganda, Hillary Onek, Uganda’s Minister for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees announced that they have begun a process of training and equipping the UPDF (Uganda People’s Defense Forces) and police officers with skills and tools to give support in case of landslides and massive floods.

While all this is being done in general, the tech world is not talking about the much feared El Niño. For CIOs and other executives, a pandemic like El Niño poses a serious risk/problem to their businesses.

IT officers and staff have an obligation to their organizations to reduce the negative risk potential in advance or quickly initiate mitigating measures if and when those risks materialize.

CEO’s in East Africa should get ready if they have not yet done so, to listen to the stuff from the IT desk as they communicate the value of the organisation’s IT business continuity plan and how IT disaster recovery planning and DR technologies can steer the organization’s strategy away from disaster during the coming El Niño.

The CIO has much to fear should this much-hyped disastrous season come in with a swag of anger. Every day, businesses and organisations of different sizes from small to large multinational corporations find themselves in new perilous situations, some even worse than El Niño.

The description given to El Niño and because of experiences in the previous El Niño, a CIO in East Africa would definitely be prepared for developments like natural events, IT failure, disruptive acts, power outages, fire, IT move/upgrade, water leakage, environmental, theft, flood, IT capacity, IT user error.

The magnitude of disaster is much felt when one looks at the geographical area of impact from a situation like when there is a loss of disk or server at an office, or loss of a data center or building or even loss of multiple data centers, a campus or a city or let’s say an entire village.

The mentions above are very familiar territory for the CIO. The challenge for them is how to mitigate or finally jump out of the disaster when it finally occurs. The answers to that is normally in how the CIO has drafted and presented his or her disaster preparedness and recovery plans.

In the daily CIO schedule, one normally has at least a contingency plan just in case anything negative occurs. It is in-built in the CIO’s DNA that disaster preparedness is a priority item.

Anyway, the question here to the CIO in East Africa is that how prepared are you for the El Niño rains?