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The ability to be able to maintain good communications, specifically telecommunications, is key to effective business continuity management.

In an era where the transfer of information around the world can take only seconds, waiting hours, or even days, to re-establish an organisation’s telecommunication links, such as receiving incoming calls – the lifeblood of any business – will place its reputation under serious threat. Remember… nothing significant happens in business until the phone rings.

So why is it that detailed consideration of how to recover an organisation’s mission-critical incoming calls – whether they be lost as a result of a wayward digger cutting through telephone cables, the failure of an organisation’s PBX through a power cut or other technical failure, or the loss of the office due to a gas explosion in an adjacent building – is so often over looked?

The simple fact is that the telephone has become invisible, while reliance on it has become complete; a perception of constant availability has created a culture of complaisance. But in an increasingly risk-averse economy, no organisation can afford a glitch in service – whatever the cause. Business as usual is essential if customers are to retain faith in an organisation’s ability to deliver on time and to contract – from manufacturing to financial services. Indeed, a recent survey undertaken on behalf of the Business Continuity Institute revealed that telecoms protection is almost a blind spot in the planning of many businesses. When asked to think of something adverse happening to their business, few respondents spontaneously thought of telecoms failure. But when asked directly, nearly all acknowledged that it’s one of the gravest threats of all.

And with the growing threat of a conventional flu pandemic now becoming a matter of when, not if, according to Sir Liam Donaldson, the UK government’s chief medical officer, organisations of all sizes should be giving serious consideration to how their business would continue to function as seamlessly as is possible in the circumstances. But perhaps this lack of focus on telecoms is understandable – the phone service is highly reliable; indeed, the carriers’ exchanges are, because of OfCom regulation, 99.999% reliable. But this reliability does not include the connection between the local exchange and a company’s premises – running underneath the pavement, these cables are now fighting for space with a multiplicity of other services and increasingly prone to accidental failure.

Furthermore, with every component of the telephony system, dependent on power (from PBX to ISDN 30 connection), for those organisations without an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), an outage will bring down not only their IT systems but the telephony network as well.

Of course, at a pinch, employees can take to their mobiles – fine if the problem is building-specific, but no good if it affects a wide area, when the mobile network will fail through congestion overload within minutes. And what about mission-critical inbound calls? With the PBX down, calls cannot be automatically forwarded from DDI number to mobile, leaving customers’ calls unanswered. Just how much would it cost an organisation if customers could not get in touch for 30 minutes, an hour, a day, a week? And what is the ongoing impact on reputation and loss of customer confidence in an organisation’s ability to meet its obligations?

Many companies choose to rely on the ever-growing number of “recovery sites” from an increasing number of specialist providers. However, while the principle of contractually securing access and use of such a recovery site might appear to constitute a viable business continuity solution, in reality migration to such a facility presents many additional considerations that require addressing prior to the re-establishment of business as usual.

While the number of available recovery sites in the UK is increasing, availability of such facilities remain limited, as they are invariably located in and around major conurbations. Consequently, re-location to a contracted recovery site may well require significant additional travelling by your workforce, which needs organising at extremely short notice. This can create problems for the workforce, who may, for example, be on flexi-time in order to pick up/care for their children after school and are unable to relocate. Assuming you ask your carrier to divert your DDI range to your disaster recovery location, are you aware that all calls, voice, fax and data will be delivered to a single destination. All calls for your DDI being received by a single phone, along with faxes, data and no information about who the call is for or from, can create significant problems.

Although your recovery provider will endeavour to allow you access to your recovery facility as soon as possible, they are contractually allowed to exclude you for up to four hours following notification that their services are required. In the worst case scenario, the recovery suite will already be occupied by another customer and the recovery provider will endeavour to re-position you in another location, which could be miles away.  

Once in your recovery location, it is then that all calls can be directed through to a single point. But until you can configure the switch at the recovery site to work for you, how are you going to forward calls on to the correct individual and where are they positioned? What about calls for your staff that are not allocated space in the recovery site? How long is it going to take to configure the switch to be able to connect them? It is not unrealistic to assume at least two additional hours, with up to 24 hours’ delay before the switch is ready.

In simple terms, all businesses require a telephony business continuity solution that will allow them to take advantage of all the existing telephony in place within all offices, recovery locations, employees’ home phones and mobiles. This can be achieved by simply adopting a telecommunications platform with the ability to re-direct all incoming calls to the DDI range to any number of different locations as circumstances dictate to ensure all calls are answered by the right person.

Implementation of a solution must be instantaneous, and call routing profiles should be able to be amended to the fit situation immediately. This will ensure that all calls are answered and your business will maintain consistent communication with the people who matter most.

The phone’s reliability has become its Achille’s heel. It is an invaluable, yet invisible, business tool and, as a result, few organisations take the time to consider the implications of lost voice communications. And yet the cost to business is severe – as many organisations have discovered. Several thousands of pounds and a loss of customer reputation later, a business continuity strategy and solution for the telephony network is top priority.