Telecommunications services – risk and vulnerability indicators

Mike Mikkelsen provides a telecoms continuity checklist based on the lessons learned from the March 2004 Manchester telecoms outage.

It’s now a few months since a widespread and long-lasting telecoms outage in the Manchester area of north west England provided a sharp wakeup call to many companies concerning their high dependency on telecommunications services.

I have been considering for some time whether this incident would follow the normal course: over-action at the time of the impact, followed by a deal of ‘huffin and a’puffin’ for a short period thereafter, followed by the heaving of sighs of relief that ‘there hasn’t been another one’ and a blissful return to inactivity.

It has concerned me for years that the business continuity sector does not really ‘learn from and by experience’ and, certainly, many businesses seem reluctant to take advantage of the experience of others to review and improve their own business continuity capabilities.

So, please consider this as a friendly wake-up call and a serious attempt to encourage you to consider the risks and vulnerabilities displayed during the Manchester incident in terms of your own enterprise.

Please find a series of simple questions that you can pose to the telecommunications experts in your enterprise and indeed to your chosen supplier of telecommunications services:

1. Do you single-source your enterprise’s telecommunication services?
2. What written and verbal indication has your chosen supplier(s) given to their commitment to business continuity management?
3. Does your supplier embrace and support any accepted business continuity management frameworks, e.g. PAS 56, in its commitment to business continuity management?
4. Does your chosen supplier completely provide your services or do they use wholesale agreements from other suppliers to provide elements and/or components of your service?
5. If the latter, how does your supplier interface (commercially and operationally) with other suppliers in the event of a service-interrupting incident?
6. Have you quantified and qualified your enterprise’s dependency on telecommunication services – (by the use of ‘telecommunications services impact analysis’ for example)?
7. Have you applied appropriate risk and dependency reduction strategies to the telecommunication services that support your enterprise?
8. Have you exercised and tested the continuity component of your telecommunications services?

I hope that you find the above questions valuable in analysing and developing the ‘risk and vulnerability indicators’ for your enterprise’s telecommunications services and that in the unlikely event of a catastrophic impact on your regional telecommunications infrastructure your enterprise will be better prepared.

Mike Mikkelsen, FBCI, Redan International Limited mikem@redan-international.com
www.redan-international.com

•Date: 21st Sept 2004 •Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity
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