Every good Business Continuity Plan must include a comprehensive section on telecoms resilience to ensure their organisation is covered in case of a business disruption – including how to answer the phones when employees are stuck at home due to severe snow or flooding.
Often this area can be neglected because the Business Continuity Manager has been advised by their Telecoms Manager that ‘they are covered’ and they often do not enquire any further as to how well they are covered because the subject is too technical or because they accept what the Telecoms Manager has said.
Alternatively there is a very common misconception that telecoms is always available in some form, either via PSTN or the mobile network and therefore back up is not high on the priority list.
The Good Practice Guide to Telecommunications Resilience, produced by the NISCC ( National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre), contains a very useful self-assesment questionnaire which helps Business Continuity Managers plan for an outage in Telecoms by asking 20 pertinent questions. If any of these cannot be answered then I would suggest that there is a hole in your plan…
Such questions include:
Do you have a full and complete list of your business-critical telecommunication services, and the critical systems that support them?
Can you identify the telecommunication services that support your critical systems?
Do you know if critical services are routed via different network components so that a failure of one component will not affect all critical services?
And one big question to provide your current telecoms provider….
You know your network attributes; what is your best practice solution for my particular requirement, and can you demonstrate to me that it can be designed and built resilient and that it will stay resilient?
Does your Business Continuity Plan sufficiently cover Telecoms Resilience?
GemaTech can work with you to answer these questions and we provide help and assistance in understanding all the issues related to telecoms resilience which you can find on our website or by signing up to our various newsletters and white papers.
