| Further lessons from Manchester Businesses in north west England are still experiencing communications problems, four days after a fire in a tunnel destroyed critical British Telecom cables. In this short article IBM’s Robin Gaddum gives his thoughts on what businesses should learn from the incident:
2. Larger businesses with distributed offices and a voice telephony network with multiple points of entry / exit to the public switched network have been better able to cope by diverting incoming calls at the affected office to other locations in the short term and either transferring workloads or asking staff to work from another office for a period. They are also generally financially in a stronger position to absorb the cost of a few days lost productivity in a part of the organisation. The impact upon single office location SMEs in the affected area could be more serious - particularly as this type of business often underspends or has no business continuity arrangements. 3. Some organisations may have hesitated to invoke business continuity measures, believing that the disruption would be short term, i.e. they will take the hit of several days interruption to communications; time will tell if they have gambled correctly (those without business continuity arrangements have little choice). I would generally recommend invoking immediately and preparing the recovery site for use before taking the decision whether or not to restart live operations from the recovery site, otherwise valuable time is lost. 4. This incident reinforces the need to select a recovery site location with some care to avoid live and disaster recovery site being affected by the same event. Too often we focus upon distance and ignore other potential risk profiles that do not vary in a linear fashion with distance. Relying upon the same exchange is one example, same flood plain is another example. In my experience, most specialist third party provider disaster recovery sites are resilient to this type of event through diverse telecomms supplies and / or the facility to fall clients back to an alternate disaster recovery site. 5. Cellular networks will always experience increased traffic volumes when land lines are unavailable, possibly rendering this fallback method of communications unreliable. 6. Companies such as Cellhire offer a form of disaster recovery agreement for the supply and short term rental of mobile phones, satellite phones and satellite data terminals. These are used, amongst others, by some of the blue light services. Combination phones that switch between available cellular networks and fall back to satellite are also available. There are some drawbacks to satellite phones in that they are not always intuitive to just pick up and use and it can be difficult to find a satellite footprint if in a metropolitan area which is surrounded by tall buildings. 7. In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center event when the New York landline and cellular networks were seriously affected, IBM established a secure emergency communications network at Ground Zero using Blackberries, which also support e-mail communications. A number of other companies in the UK are also investigating emergency communications services based around Blackberries. 8. Whilst this is a major incident, there are procedures for the emergency services, BT and other carriers to respond to and handle this sort of event. The Civil Contingencies Bill adds to existing fixed PTO License conditions and Oftel advice in this area in improving the UK's response to such community-wide disruption. 9. It is worth noting that risk is rarely, if ever, eliminated. This sort of event could have affected any carrier but is statistically more likely to affect a carrier with a larger network. The carriers, in common with other utility providers that face a similar problem, have their own problem / crisis management groups to tackle these events when they do occur. Smaller scale events are far more common; one cable provider indicated that on average somewhere in the UK a section of its fibre is accidentally cut once per week, for example by builders or roadworkers. Of course, for businesses affected in these cases the impact is no less serious. 10. As staff increasingly commute longer distances to their place of work, their homes may well be outside of the affected area. Under these circumstances, homeworking may be a viable means of mitigating some of the impact, provided staff are suitably equipped. 11. It is hard for organisations to implement truly diverse comms at their sites. Using two separate carriers often offers a false sense of security as almost invariably the routes converge at some point whether it's through the same piece of ducting or at the same exchange or in some other manner. Fallback communications using microwave or satellite links are possible, but expensive. At the end of the day an up-to-date and tested business continuity plan backed up by a sensibly located recovery site with its own PABX and supply via a separate main exchange is the best defence. Robin Gaddum, MBCI, is senior consultant and team leader for IBM UK Business Continuity & Recovery Services GADDUMR@uk.ibm.com www-5.ibm.com/services/uk/portfolio/bcrs.html
•Date:1st
April 2004 •Region: UK •Type:
Article •Topic: Telecoms
continuity |
