Were you able to get into work during the recent bad weather? Hopefully you were and hopefully it was in some way linked to your adoption of technologies which assist in business continuity.

Not everybody was so lucky. The Centre for Economic and Business Research issued bleak warnings that the level of weather-related absenteeism from work could push some struggling businesses to the brink while insurance firm Royal & SunAlliance put the cost to business of the cold snap at a jaw-dropping £690m per day.

Now I think such figures should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt - if it hadn't already been spread all over the UK's roads - but the snow clearly was a serious problem for the UK and it wasn't solely down to our transport infrastructure. At Lumison we conducted some research which found two thirds of UK companies still don't have plans in place to keep staff working if they can't get into the office, while others said their technology falls well short of enabling them to do so. It seems many people still have to make do the best they can at such times.

But with broadband so readily available in most of the UK now and so much technology enabling people to work remotely is it really cost efficient to take this kind of downtime on the chin and just hope for the best?