The event held in New York at the offices of Mizhuo Bank and hosted an audience of law enforcement personnel, government employees and other security and counter terrorism professionals. Speakers at this event included Mike O’Neill, COO of MSA Security and the former commander of Counter Terrorism in the New York Police Department who developed the Police response to all Counter Terror operations in New York City post 9/11 and until his retirement.

Vice President of TINYg Andy Williams spoke about the impact of domestic extremism on organisations and individuals in terms of morale, cost and reputation.

All delegates were keen to hear the latest information regarding current threats posed by terrorists as well as exploring the technical solutions available to them for ensuring both business continuity and disaster recovery, in the event of such an attack occuring.

GemaTech’s DID Recovery and Mass Notification solutions were of particular relevance and interest. It seems that American organisations are open to the increased options available to them for ensuring telecoms business continuity and cost effective mass employee notification via sms and email.

The Portable Recovery Unit will provide the ODA with emergency telecoms recovery, should a business disruption occur. The PRU is designed to be deployed within four hours of notifying GemaTech of a disruption to incoming calls. Upon activation inbound calls to the ODA will be re-routed to a pre-determined call plan, enabling the organisation to continue providing business as usual. The call plan will be designed by the ODA to enable employees to recieve their calls on any phone in any another location.

GemaTech’s Portable Recovery Unit has also been shortlisted for ‘The Most Innovative Product of The Year’ at the upcoming CIR awards.

The PCI SSC’s full statement 3.2 released on February 18, 2010 reads:

This response is intended to provide clarification for call centers that record cardholder data in audio recordings, and applies only to the storage of card validation codes and values (referred to as CAV2, CVC2, CVV2 or CID codes by the payment brands).

Audio recording solutions that prevent the storage or facilitate the deletion of CAV2, CVC2, CVV2 or CID codes and other card data are commercially available from a number of vendors. All other recordings containing cardholder data captured by call centers must be protected in accordance with the PCI DSS, including PCI DSS requirement 3.4.

The Olympic Delivery Authority have already subscribed to the emergency telecoms recovery solution to protect their inbound calls in the event of a business disruption.

GemaTech’s portable telecoms recovery unit is designed to re-route and voice record any number of concurrent inbound calls.

Deployed as a fully managed service, the PRU is hosted in the local serving carrier’s exchange, if the ‘last mile’ circuits between the exchange and an organisation fails due to fire, flood, power failure, terrorist threat or other disruptive event, incoming calls will be re-routed to alternative phones such as mobiles, home phones or recovery sites.

In addition, by providing secure exchange based voice recording, should you wish to review the impact of your telecoms recovery plan, a record of all your re-routed voice calls will be instantly and remotely accessible via a secure web browser.

The new solution is aimed at organisations who need or want to voice record phone calls made by their employees on their smartphones, particularly when they are working away from their deskphones.

It may be that an organisation currently voice records all landline calls but does not have the capability to voice record calls made on mobile phones.

Recording calls is the best way to retain evidence of who said what to whom and avoids lengthy investigations when there are disputes or customer complaints, saving organisations time and money.

For more information on GemaTech’s smartphone voice recording solution visit our website.

GemaTech will be running a seminar on telecoms resilience, looking at both the reasons for implementing a resilient telecoms solution as well as how to comply with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. An added bonus session will be recommendations on how to engage local authority procurement departments in order to turn plans into reality led by an ex-procurement manager from a local authority.

Technology does not have to be complicated to plan and implement, and this seminar will show how to engage the relevant people to make it happen with a powerful business case so that when the office gets flooded, the ‘last mile’ telephone cable is cut, or employees can’t get to work because of the snow, the phone can still be answered and essential public services still provided.

If you are unable to make the conference you can still sign up for our newsletter which will have the content from the seminar available FREE in our next issue.

GemaTech are running a seminar on Telecoms resilience both in the morning and in the afternoon, with presentations from 3 leading experts in buisness continuity, telecoms continuity and local authority procurement.

I have included the seminar synopsis below, and details of how to get the FREE whitepapers after the event:

Telecoms Resilience: How to protect mission critical services and comply with the Civil Contingencies Act

Learn, explore and discuss telecoms resilience with industry experts to understand what your organisation needs in order to protect mission critical public services and to comply with the Civil Contingencies Act.

The Business Case for Telecoms Resilience and how to Comply with the CCA
Dean Beaumont, Business Continuity expert and former head of BT Group Business Continuity with 8 years experience in the mobile telecoms sector at strategic, tactical and operational levels, holding an MSc in Emergency Planning Management and a Member of BCI and EPS.

Proactive and Reactive Telecoms Continuity Solutions Explained
Graham Chick, specialist in ‘last mile’ telecoms resilience and CEO of GemaTech, leading providers of proactive and emergency telecoms continuity solutions.

How to Present the Business Case to Procurement to Obtain Budget and Sign off
Terry Thomas, former Head of Procurement for Dorset County Council and currently Marketing Manager for Topline Telecom, specialists in finding savings against utility spend by Local Authorities.

FREE white papers from the seminar will be made available in our next company newsletter.

Hope to see you at the Civil Contingencies Conference 2010 next week!

Businesses Should be More Aware of Norovirus as Health Protection Agency Launches Monitoring Service.
Businesses should be aware of the virulence of the Norovirus in planning business continuity. The Health Protection Agency launched a web based Norovirus outbreak monitoring service in January indicating which NHS trusts were suffering outbreaks and consequently closing wards. In the first 6 months of 2009 350 outbreaks were reported. Cases of Norovirus are not diminishing year on year, and with the new reporting system, appear to be increasing. Read More…

February

Flexible Working Enables Business Continuity for HCL During Heavy Snow in February.
Flexible Working preparations enabled employees from GemaTech’s customer, HCL (Healthcare Locums) to provide business continuity during the very heavy snow in February this year. Read More…

April

Flexible Working Technology Enables Business Continuity for City Firm During G20 Summit Protests.
GemaTech’s flexible working technology enabled a city based firm to continue operating business as usual during the G20 Summit by equipping employees with the ability to take their phone calls from home rather than battling to get into the office, by re-routing their incoming calls to a home phone or mobile number. Read More…

Businesses Disrupted as Tooley Street Floods For Second Year in a Row.
A number of businesses were disrupted when a burst water main caused a major flood in Tooley Street, London affected the same spot it did the previous year. It caused the same devestating damage as the previous year and affected major corporates and local retail outlets alike. Read More…

May

Business Continuity Awards Results – Entries up 20%.
27th May saw the presentation of this year’s Business Continuity Awards at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London. Read More…

June

Swine Flu Pandemic Accelerates Business Continuity Plans.
Many Businesses reviewed, updated and implemented their business continuity plans in light of the declaration on the 11th June this year that the world had entered a global swine flu pandemic. Read More…

Pandemic Planning for Swine Flu a Priority at Emergency Planning Society’s Conference.
Planning for the Swine Flu pandemic was the key subject at the EPS annual conference in Coventry last June. Read More…

PRU Shortlisted For Most Innovative Product Of The Year At EPS Conference.
GemaTech introduced the Portable Recovery Unit at a soft launch during the Emergency Planning Society’s (EPS) Annual Conference in June this year. The PRU was shortlisted in the category of most Innovative Product of The Year, missing out on an award purely because the product was not yet available to the market and had no existing customers. Read More…

July

Fire Breaks Out in Soho Office
At around 2pm a major fire broke out in the offices of Future Capital in Dean Street, Soho. Around 10 per cent of the building was said to be ablaze and 60 fire fighters were sent to the scene. It is believed that the fire started within an air conditioning duct. Read More…

August

PageOne Launches VoiceBlast, but is it a Restrictive Solution?
This summer PageOne launched a call cascade product called VoiceBlast. A messaging system which can simultaneously send a personalised voice message to the landline or mobile number of thousands of people within an organisation. But does this kind of very specific solution a little restrictive? Read More…

September

GemaTech launches their enhanced Rapid Call Out solution.
Gematech’s Rapid Call Out module is a rapid notification system that can simultaneously send any number of messages via SMS, voice message, email, fax, instant message, Twitter, web status page or pre-recorded announcement to any number of recipients in any global location. Read More…

November

999 Calls at Risk as Calva Bridge in Workington is Condemned.
During the major floods in Cumbria in November the town of Workington was physically cut in half by extreme amounts of flood water. 6 bridges collapsed and the last remaining, Calva Bridge carrying utilities including telecoms cables, was condemned, putting lives at risk as 999 calls relied upon this link. Read More…

BCI Conference: a Surprising Success!
As planned we exhibited at the BCi run global conference this week in the Hammersmith Novotel. This was the first year of the BCi conference and I didn’t know quite what to expect in terms of attending delegates. Read More…

GemaTech officially launches the Portable Recovery Unit OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE
UK company GemaTech launches a new approach to re-routing incoming phone calls to other phones or mobiles to facilitate business continuity in an emergency. Read More…

Media Coverage of Swine Flu Gives Strong Warnings
Mixed reactions were felt across the UK as the media reported news of 100,000 new cases within one week. Yet milder symptoms and fewer deaths than expected were seen over the course of the summer and into the autumn months. However the virus lives on and is even at risk of mutating. Deaths caused by the H1N1 strain are continuing and risk to young children is still high. Vaccine is now available and being administered to high risk groups and younger children.

As winter approaches and seasonal flu lies in wait around the corner, no organisation can ignore the predicted 40% absence rate of employees who may need time off sick or caring for children sent home from school.

GemaTech Offers Free Guidelines for Businesses
In response GemaTech offered a free ‘Pandemic Flu Guidelines For Business’ booklet on the company website which has seen many requests from around the globe due to its useful advice in preparing Business Continuity Plans for a Flu Pandemic.

Tricia Duncan (Project Manager) for Healthcare Locums explains:

“Our headquarters are situated in the heart of London and the traffic and disruption caused by the G20 summit protests led to us making the decision to allow some of our employees who live outside the city to take their phone calls from home.”

The G20 Summit was always predicted to attract a large number of protestors. For city based firms this posed a number of business continuity threats, from disruptions to public transport, road closures and attacks and threats on staff and property. HCL informed employees who would normally travel into the city, that they could work from home and have their phone calls re-routed to their home phone lines to save time and hassle. This meant that time wasted due to transport disruptions was minimal and business could operate as normal.

This fore-sight was invaluable as online reports during and after the protests showed banks being targeted by protestors and many people faced long and difficult journeys in and out of the city as a result.

Flexible working can be used during any type of disruptive event, making business continuity easy for any organisation.