Developing and Maintaining a Telecom Recovery Plan
Analysis of Risk Assessment
Upon completion of the Risk Assessment and armed with weighted risk ratings the Business Continuity Team can begin to develop an efficient and robust Telecom Recovery Plan.
The Recovery Team
Deciding on the key personnel directly involved in implementing the recovery plan is an early consideration. The relevant staff members or outsourced personnel will have designated roles to play and tasks to perform once an emergency has occurred and business communications are down.
These roles will vary and be tailored to cope with the possible disaster scenarios assessed during the risk analysis process. Where the tasks are more specialized, a 3rd party provider may be drafted into the plan to cover specialist areas.
An administrator is appointed to become part of the business continuity plan development team, and subsequently will be used in a training role and also as a supervisor to the recovery team during any telecoms outage. The supervisor will liaise with any affected partner companies and suppliers, plus address employee, customer and press concerns during the recovery period.
The supervisor will have a thorough understanding of the phone and communications systems and will be involved in the development, implementation and continued maintenance of the plan.
Structured Recovery Plan
It should be structured so that a series of stages are completed as part of the recovery process with preset goals needing to be reached as the plan is implemented and telecommunications are gradually brought back online.
Stage one in an overall disaster recovery process is addressing the immediate consequences and affects of the emergency and these depend on the cause and may involve emergency services and other specialists. The immediate consequences may be destruction of property due to fire or flood, or possibly a failure of hardware due to sabotage. The secondary consequence is loss of communications and it is here that a business telecom recovery plan will come into play.
Interim goals in the DR plan may include establishing an acceptable level of temporary communications infrastructure, informing affected parties, positioning staff, activation of a hardware repair agreement and dealing with the press, with later stages including testing and checking of repaired systems and public or client statements.
Phone Systems Backup
Modern phone systems are a combination of advanced hardware and software applications. Outside of complete destruction due to natural causes or sabotage, failure can occur in either or both for a variety of reasons.
In-house systems can feature anything from a surge protector or uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) through to environmentally controlled fire proof locations or a complete phone system backup.
Increasingly companies are outsourcing both their phone systems and the backup. Specialist companies provide virtual systems that can replicate every aspect of an in-house hardware system. These are brought online immediately after a telecom outage with little or no interruption to business communications.
Once staff are aware of the outage and are suitably repositioned to take calls, the virtual system answers enquiries in the same manner as the in-house system with callers unaware that there are any problems.
DR Plan Maintenance
The Telecom Recovery plan will need to adapt to company changes. As the structure of a business changes due to staff increases or even new branches telecom recovery will need to evolve accordingly. The DR plan supervisor can adjust the plan to incorporate smaller changes but a major revision of the plan may be necessary periodically.
Hosted 3rd party recovery systems will have the advantage that they can more easily adapt to the requirements of an expanding company.
