Rethinking telecommunications backup strategies
The disaster recovery / business continuity press is often filled with dire predictions of what can happen to your organization: plague, pestilence, terror… the list goes on. But, what is it that happens every day in the real world? We were approached by one organization recently with an immediate need for a telecommunications backup solution. The nature of their situation caused us to analyze what has actually happened to our clients during the five years in which we have been providing our telecommunications continuity service. According to some private research data that came to our attention late last year, VCS has experienced more live emergency invocations than any other organization participating in the survey. In reviewing those invocations, it was interesting to find that not a single invocation was disaster related! So, what did happen? One of our clients maintains offices in a large office complex. Another (unrelated) tenant in the same complex became the object of a labor action. Our client didn’t want their employees to be subjected to the unpleasantness of crossing the picket lines to reach their place of employment. They invoked our service and their employees worked from their home offices for the duration of the strike. An unusual application, but very effective. Another client invoked the service in order to perform maintenance on their telephone switch during working hours. All of the remaining invocations were due to loss of telecommunications resulting from circuit or switch failures at the customers’ local service providers’ locations. Lesson: Much attention in the business continuity community is focused on preparation for large well publicized, yet seemingly remote events. Disaster recovery and business continuity planners frequently have difficulty obtaining upper management buy-in for such seldom occurring events. Yet, everyday, seemingly pedestrian events can and will affect the way you conduct business when they happen to you. The price can be high, even during a short duration communications loss. The true measure of a disaster is not the impact upon our facilities; it is the impact upon our customers and the future cash flows that are subsequently reduced. We need to stop planning around the causes of disasters and start planning around the impact factor - the customer. The customer does not care if he/she cannot get service as a result of a fire, a power failure, a problem with phone switching stations, a strike or Marshal Law. The customer only cares that he/she cannot get to you and get what he needs from you. The ‘everyday’ business problem or social unrest can be just as devastating as any hurricane and is far more likely to happen. What people fail to recognize, is that if they can deal successfully with the everyday problems, they will be able to deal with that ‘once in a life time’ major disaster that might arrive some day. We have it backwards in the planning field, trying to plan for the major disaster and forgetting about the daily problems that cost us money everyday. Maybe it’s time to rethink the strategies for and reasons why your organization needs communications backup. Mike Bemis, CBRM, CEO, Voice Continuity Services, Inc. Thanks to John Stagl and J. Pat Romeo for their valued input.
•Date: 12th July 2007• Region: US •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity |
