15.14 Conclusion

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Many corporations typically focus on protecting information systems at the expense of telecommunications services, preferring to leave the latter to various carriers and service providers. But both are critical elements of business continuity, and companies can take steps to better protect telecommunications by weighing the various protection options that have become available in recent years. Businesses, therefore, should conduct an analysis of what defines their organization’s critical business functions and how telecommunications services support those functions. This should include identifying and prioritizing risks (such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks) that correspond to those functions and establishing policies to avoid or mitigate those risks.

In the past, most organizations relied on their local or long-distance carrier for maintaining acceptable network performance. More often than not, the carriers were not up to the task. This led to the emergence and spectacular growth of private networks in the mid-1980s, which allowed companies to exercise close control of leased lines with an in-house staff of network managers, technicians, and other support personnel.

Today, companies are once again relying on carriers to maintain acceptable network performance. In their eagerness to recapture a lost market, carriers have made great strides in improving their response to network congestion and outages and back up their performance with SLAs. The ability of carriers to restore failed lines and whole nodes quickly and efficiently has gone a long way toward restoring lost confidence that once prompted companies to set up and maintain their own networks. The carriers’ ability to meet virtually any customer requirement for reliability is a compelling argument for returning to the public network for voice and data services.

With more and more companies recognizing the strategic value of their private networks, the ability to restore failed lines and whole nodes quickly and efficiently becomes an essential network planning consideration. By using the inherent restoration capabilities offered by more sophisticated network systems and equipment (such as T1 and inverse multiplexers and intelligent calling systems), companies can make use of standby links or available carrier services until primary links are restored to service. In the process of optimizing their networks for reliability and availability, companies can greatly enhance their competitive position.

These benefits are attainable by devising a disaster recovery plan for critical information systems and telecommunications services. The plan should include establishing primary and alternate recovery teams, setting up notification procedures such as call trees, determining primary and alternate meeting sites, tracking inventories of systems and services, having readily accessible contact information for vendors and carriers, and clearly defining contingency procedures and lines of responsibility. Periodic training and testing for the disaster recovery team is a way to fine-tune the contingency plan and ensure that all of the components of the plan work when disaster strikes.

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