| Purchasing
workplace recovery services Telephony solutions, mirroring of PC set-ups and the risk of your business continuity supplier having multiple invocations all raise issues for today’s BC manager trying to ensure a fast, low-risk recovery. In our experience, customers are always looking for faster recovery solutions, but recent events have made them increasingly conscious of the risks of multiple invocations. Keeping your people and your information (be this data or intellectual capital) connected is a vital part of ensuring the availability of your business, addressing as it does people issues, technology issues and communications issues. In our experience this three-pronged ‘information availability’ approach is essential to moving business continuity to the next level. Telephony The delivery of calls to the right person at
time of disaster is highly complex and requires the input of customer
IT staff specialising in this field. Yet, in our experience, telecoms
IT staff are rarely involved in the business continuity process,
while BC managers rarely understand the complicated telephony issues. Looking at these issues in turn, because of the cost involved in redirecting multiple geographic numbers, recovery contracts tend to redirect potentially hundreds of DDI numbers to a single number. In simple telephone recovery environments, these are then answered by an operator and connected to the correct person. Whilst this sounds simple, it is worth recalling that, today, most businesses receive a lesser number of calls via the switchboard operator, and most go via DDI numbers. In a disaster you have an upsurge of calls, a reduction in personnel to perhaps 20-30 per cent of workforce and a loss of DDI functionality, so the standard operator driven re-direction of DDI is based upon handling many more calls than your switchboard operator normally would. Therefore, if possible, BC managers should aim for telephony solutions that require few or no operators, as a manual redirection process can take time and is often rife with errors. To alleviate these problems, BC managers should look for recovery centres with telephone switches capable of delivering services such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automated Attendant and Automatic Call Distribution. These automatically redirect calls to the right person with no need for operators or a bespoke DDI redirection service, regardless of the location of the person within the recovery centre. If the solution is deployed correctly, staff can simply log in and out via the telephone handset when they arrive and leave their desks, and incoming calls will be directed to them using an IVR system to capture the right extension number. SunGard believes this solution is so key to a successful recovery that it provides it as part of its standard service, with each customer provided with their own, unique configuration and DDI numbers to enable them to set up redirection with their telecoms provider. With your own BC provider, insist on regular testing to maintain the telephony configuration to match the capabilities of your own system. Multiple invocations and telephony Systems like this require the BC manager to maintain plans and send updates to the provider so they can include it in the configuration file. If this happens, on arrival at the recovery centre, the staff merely login to whichever desk they have been allocated and start to receive calls as normal without any of the delays which manual call redirection would cause. PC set-up It is advisable, particularly if a firm subscribes to more than one recovery location, that the PCs provided are of exactly the same specification. It will reduce recovery times significantly if companies can multi-cast a PC ghost image simultaneously across all PCs logged on to a network, rather than have to configure them individually. In practice, a same-specification recovery centre means that a whole network of PCs can be set up in ten minutes, rather than it taking thirty minutes to do one. Historically, delays in PC recovery have not been seen as being a problem given the time taken to recover the servers they are attached too. However, with the trend towards mirrored, always available servers and applications, the benefits of faster PC recovery are now being clearly seen. As well as cutting recovery times, desktop
conformity and the adoption of sophisticated imaging methodologies
enables customer images to be operable in any suite or location
for enhanced service flexibility and efficiency. Companies who have
outsourced their desktop support benefit considerably from this
approach since they are frequently charged for every image created.
This hidden cost is often not considered during the business continuity
procurement process. Having a standard PC is all very well but when
will it next be updated? BC managers should look for the timings
of PC refresh cycles and the methodology behind these to provide
certainty that the PCs will continue to offer the requisite functionality
for the life of the contract. In a simultaneous recovery, the invoking parties are aware of the difficulties of the other and tend to work together to mutual benefit. The result may be that while recovery times may be longer than normal, the additional disruption is ‘shared’ by both parties. In my opinion, the more difficult question to ask is what happens if someone else invokes a few days after me? The first invoking party has already recovered from one disaster; will it then suffer further disasters while the second or third party recovers, and while it is preparing to return home? Experience has shown that if the first invoker is not to be disrupted, the subsequent parties will experience a considerable delay in meeting their recovery objectives. This is why we have developed technology and methodologies that ensure that, whether the invoking party is first or last, the plan and recovery objectives remain the same and can be met. To contact SunGard e-mail infoavail@sungard.com or visit www.availability.sungard.com
•Date:11th
July 2003 •Region: Worldwide •Type:
Article •Topic: Recovery
facilities |
