Telecom Business Continuity and Disaster Planning

Your persevering desire to satisfy our unique requirements, and your never-ending attention to detail has contributed to making me a well-pleased customer of Teleconvergence. Because of your enduring efforts, the public safety needs of Tillamook County will be satisfied for some years to come.

Mark Schackart, Administrator
Tillamook County Emergency Communications District [911]

Section Content

Overview

IT is traditionally responsible for preparing for contingencies or emergencies involving power, networks, file backup, physical access to facilities, etc. Teleconvergence’s Contingency Telecommunications Planning is different in two aspects.  First, it addresses not just “normal” or “adverse” conditions, but includes plans for operating under extraordinary circumstances as well. Second, it is pointedly focused on telecommunications continuity, although the form that takes may be dramatically different than day-to-day operations.

Under certain circumstances, clients can also turn such contingency capabilities into revenue generating possibilities, as noted in Turning a Contingency Plan Into a Business Opportunity in the Strategic Telecommunications Marketing (STM) section.

What is the essential nature of an intelligent contingency business continuity plan? Since no one would deliberately create an unintelligent one, any intelligent business continuity plan must have at least two components: a Plan A, which represents normal operations, and a Plan B, which assumes normal operations have been interrupted, if only because NO plan works as planned forever.

Many experienced businesspersons also realize (1) that they can't plan for everything and (2) that they can’t plan for what they haven’t thought of, and so they also create a Plan C solely to maintain critical operations, because whatever affects Plan A might just affect Plan B, too.

Introduction

Teleconvergence offers two related primary continuity/emergency planning services.

Telecommunications Continuity Planning deals with contingency planning for interruptions in telecommunications services.

 Business/Natural Disaster Continuity Planning and Preparedness entails the ability to strategically deploy telecommunications and related technologies to deal with potential as well as unforeseeable and extraordinary emergencies.

Not all disaster and emergency scenarios are the same, although all inevitably prevent the client from operating normally. Simple scenarios involve malfunctions in a client’s system or network. Other scenarios interrupt operations by making the client's premises dangerous or uninhabitable (e.g. gas leak, fire, terrorism). Still others prevent access to the client’s premises (e.g., flooding, ice storm, road closures) so that no one can get to the phones. In either event, what do you do? How to you keep operating?

Teleconvergence's services help clients plan ahead for such contingencies, greatly minimizing possible risk, and certainly costing far less money than it will if they are not anticipated. Not thinking it through beforehand, it seems to us, inevitably puts you at great if not almost unlimited, risk.

Planning like this doesn't take place in a vacuum.  It requires awareness of business priorities, operating needs, staffing conditions, budgets, and, of course, technological alternatives, but only if consistent with the foregoing.  Technology is not the main consideration, but only a tool to meet business requirements.

If you agree, and you're interested in our aproach, please read the other two articles in this section.

A Brief Continuity Planning Checklist

Do these scenarios really apply to your organization, and if so, how ready are you to deal with them? Read the following checklist and make your own determination.

  • If you run a school or manage another type of campus and there’s a terrorist incident on your premises, say a shooting, what would you do?
    • First, do you know how to go about locating the perpetrators? After that, how to inform the authorities, how to evacuate which persons from what buildings and what areas under what circumstances and bring what other personnel and assets to bear on the situation?
    • In short, what’s your plan?
       
  • If your communications capabilities were suddenly and significantly impacted and diminished, have you (a) identified the organizational processes with the highest priority or those most susceptible to interruption and (b) either already pre-reconfigured your facilities or else determined how to do so in the event of such a disruption?
     
  • Are you familiar with your options in event of telecom supplier bankruptcy? Some telecommunications agreements require you to remain with your supplier regardless of quality of service during such a period because bankruptcy is specifically defined as a condition that preempts or supersedes any contractual escape provisions in case of vendor non-performance.
    • Do you understand where you would stand in such an event, especially if your normal telecommunications traffic is largely or completely committed to your existing vendor? In other words, what’s your Plan B?
       
  • If there was a pending natural disaster, say a hurricane or an ice storm or sudden high winds were pushing a flooding river over its banks towards your building, are you prepared to contact everyone necessary, either to keep them away and safe from harm or else to mobilize them to participate in emergency operations?
    • And how are you prepared to keep operating under such circumstances?
       
  • Similarly, suppose there had been an unexpected flood or explosion and you had to alert your employees not to come to work and tell them where to report instead, divided into different groups at different locations at different times.
    • How do you give supervisors one set of marching orders and your employees a different set of instructions, all basically simultaneously? That's your plan C, remember?
    • When you have people due to report at certain times and places, how do you reach them in time to redirect them, especially when their emergency reach information changes based upon whether it’s day or night, weekday or weekend, etc?
    • How do you arrange for emergency numbers to be called so that employees can reach up-to-date information and instructions about how to carry on the business under extraordinary circumstances?

 

Almost Every Business Needs a Plan B. Some Just Need It More Than Others

At one time or another, every business owner thinks about what might happen if primary telecommunications facilities were disrupted or become generally unreliable. Many managers who have experienced such events take steps to ensure non-recurrence, such as using backup carriers and networks. Unfortunately, many of these plans turn out to have the same Achilles heel, meaning very little if any additional protection has been obtained.

We've had clients who thought they were adequately protected by having two suppliers. It always makes sense to use multiple suppliers so that if one is performing poorly, traffic can be shifted to another. It's a good, basic Plan B. However, in most buildings, all telecommunications facilities are located in the same area, so if that area is damaged by fire or water, all facilities are equally at risk, and nothing is gained.

Some clients have taken the extra step of running separate feeds from different suppliers into different parts of a building. This affords greater protection, but it's also happened that some distance off, the separate feeds had the same route to the client – and a backhoe pulled up the cable(s) before the feeds diverged – with obviously disastrous results. Did the client need a plan C? Perhaps, but at least having a plan B offers greater safety than a single plan A.

Teleconvergence helps our clients decide what they will do when Plan B also fails, as it inevitably will.