Business Continuity

Ever considered how your business would cope if the phone lines went dead for a week or the local sub station was put out of action. No – well you should, in fact we all should because the likely result is that we would all be struggling.

Disasters are by definition high profile and we always tend to think they happen to someone else and not ourselves. By far and away the most catastrophic event to disrupt the telecommunications infrastructure for some time has to be the major fire in the Manchester tunnels running 30-35 meters below ground which took out, allegedly, over 100,000, and some say up to 130,000 telephone lines in and around the Manchester area for a number of days, and in many instances several weeks!

This major outage identified and exploded a number of commonly held myths regarding the in-built resilience of the Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN). Until Manchester many people truly believed that by purchasing additional “lines” from alternative carriers and/or paying additional sums for “diverse routing” from the same carrier – the ability to deliver incoming/outgoing calls through a second trunk, presumably via a completely different geographical route would provide the resilience that they were looking for.

Diverse Routing means two separate sets of lines, yes – but possibly running in the same duct – or same tunnel! – something that business continuity specialists have been warning clients to check with their selected carrier for a number of years. Whilst providing some degree of added resilience by protecting against a cable fault it does nothing to protect against the vagaries of the wayward mechanical digger driver cutting through both cables running through the same duct or determined terrorists intent on causing maximum damage via a roadside explosion.

Manchester also highlighted potential problems associated with the fact that businesses thought that by renting additional line connections from different carriers they were fully protected – failing to realise that some of these carriers delivered services by renting their lines from BT, which (surprise, surprise) ran in the same ducts and tunnels as their existing BT lines!

Remember also that “porting” numbers from, say, BT to a different carrier does nothing other than change the company that you received your telephone bill from, the actual service is still delivered by the original carrier.

However, whilst the provision of “diverse routing” or even “separaty” provides additional resilience in the delivery mechanism – the trunks delivering calls to Corporate Britain's place of business, the office, it fails to address the fundamental issue of what would happen to Corporate Britain's businesses when nobody can talk to them – because they can't get to, or work from their conventional place of business.

Every Risk Manager worthy of the title fully appreciates, there are innumerable reasons why a company's staff can not gain access to their place of work – fire, flood, access denial as a consequence of adjacent fire, gas explosion, terrorist attack to name but a few. Having identified a number of the potential problems that can seriously disrupt a company's ability to keep trading by actually maintaining telecommunications contact with their customers and suppliers… what are the solutions? .

Given all of the shortcomings there has to be a better and more cost effective solution to the fundamental issue of protecting and maintaining a company's most important lifeline to the outside commercial world, its voice communications. Even with the increasing use of web sites, and e-mail, contact telephone numbers remain paramount, coining the adage “nothing happens in business until the phone rings”.

Unfortunately few technology companies have addressed this subject given the normally inherent resilience within the PSTN network. However, new, and extremely cost-effective products are now available which are directly focussed on the instantaneous recovery of a company's incoming calls.

• How long could our business survive without access to a working telephone?
• How much money would we lose if we were unable to “trade” for 1 hour?...1day?…1 week?… or longer?
• How long do I have to invoke a solution before my business is severely impacted?
• How can I intelligently deliver inbound calls to 100% of the workforce affected by the “disaster”
• How easy is it to establish and set up different re-routing call plans that can be administered and activated by non-technical staff immediately following a disaster?
• How easy is it to maintain and update the alternative call plans as staff join, leave, fall sick, transfer departments etc?
• What can my carrier really provide, at what cost, and with what level of control?