| VOIP - BUSINESS CONTINUITY risks unclear The interim results of Continuity Central's current survey into Voice over Internet Protocol show that confusion reigns. VoIP is assumed by many market analysts to be the technology of the future, but have the business continuity risks really been considered? Continuity Central's current quick survey aims to throw some light on this area, but what seems to becoming clear is that there is much confusion in this area amongst business continuity managers. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET TAKEN PART, YOUR PARTICIPATION WOULD BE VERY WELCOME - CLICK HERE The results at the half way stage in the survey are as follows: 1) What is the status of VoIP implementation
in your company? 2) What impact will VoIP have on the risks
faced by your company? 3) It would be helpful if you could add
some explanatory comments to your above answers * Risks may not increase or decrease but they will certainly differ compared to today’s situation. * There is some question as to whether VoIP will perform in high volume environments. * We have had VoIP for some two years now with Cisco IP Phone 7960. There is no integration with the desktop as yet. When true convergence of voice, data and video occurs then the risks will become significant because of the reliance that people will place on the technologies. Without the convergence it is just a smart phone. * VoIP technology, although saving considerable sums of money, has huge implications, as far a business continuity goes. The very fact that IP addressed voice routing is systems and networks based, means that it has an inherent single point of failure - overload, damage, or take out part of a network, and you've taken the communications system. Which is why the bank I work for restricts communications to hard wired solutions which (hopefully) have greater operational resilience. * Instead of having only data over the network we would rely on the network for voice also. If a fully meshed multi-vendors network were not established we could face once again a single point of failure. * More eggs into one basket. When voice was separate it was a separate recovery and separate resources. Now it is dependent on IP being available. Perhaps I am staid in my opinions, and once it settles down and beds in - I will feel better. * VoIP is great in a production mode. The recovery of the Call Manager has yet to be determined by Cisco. When brought up at our company they acted like it was the first time they thought about recovery. Frustrating very ‘bleeding edge’ from a recovery standpoint. Remember, VoIP requires special handsets that have approx. costs of $350 each. To leverage VoIP in recovery mode means you need to have duplicate phones in storage. * With redundancy is the right places, there will only be a short term risk increase as there is with all new systems. It is being done as a business operations improvement rather than just a BCP action and it is felt that it will increase reliability. * We used VOIP as a backup when cell phones and circuit switched services were unavailable during the NYC power outage. We continue to implement it for low priority and backup services. * We will have trouble communicating during power outages, impacting our continuity and emergency response capabilities * With VOIP, if you lose the data link you lose it all. With separate systems, you can still maintain communications. * Use of VoIP reduces our risks as it allows for simpler switching of telephone lines in the event of disruption at one of our sites. * The technology is so new that risks
have not been identified. Once risks are identified, then plans
can be formulated. |
