After 9/11, facing worst-case scenarios no longer seems outside the realm of possibility. Laezza suggests that your risk assessment checklist should include hard questions like: if an office were to totally disappear, would you be able to recover and restore business as usual? To answer that question, you need to examine who resides in that location. What work do those employees do for the business? What is the critical nature of that work? Can you potentially recover that work in a different location? The answers may lead you to devise a backup and redundancy strategy to cover your bases.
On a less extreme note: if you were unable to get into a physical plant -- due to vandalism, flooding, or even a faulty air-conditioning system spewing out noxious fumes -- would you be able to recover and restore business as usual? In such cases, Laezza recommends using technology to your advantage. Voice over IP, for instance, can enable you to recover communications in different locations. Consolidating the traditional phone network with your data network would enable your employees to work from home or other locations even if the office building was quarantined.
As an expert in network operations, Laezza offers some additional advice to maintain high availability of your corporate network during natural or man-made disasters:
- Don't put all your network eggs in one basket. Diversity will ensure uninterrupted availability of your business. Make sure your third-party provider's network doesn't have a single point of failure. It should encompass dual fibre optic routes and network hubs that support your network in separate physical locations. To improve your chances of continuity, you may also want to consider using separate carriers to support core operations.
- Seek out carriers with self-healing networks. Not all carriers deploy ring configurations that can withstand fibre cuts or outside plant explosions without losing service. Make sure your carrier can withstand the loss of a node within the ring itself and not lose service. With self-healing networks, fibre paths support three terminals in a ring. If you lose a path because of a fibre cut -- for example, if a street repair crew gets a little careless -- the traffic actually switches to the other side of the ring, and service remains uninterrupted.
- Consider turning your provider network over to carriers who live and breathe network maintenance and security. In recent years, some enterprises have taken on the role of operating their own private networks. But the approach has some serious pitfalls. Businesses commonly don't have the specialised talent to support and maintain a full network. Without the training, manpower, and preparation time necessary to cover all the bases, your exposure in the event of a disaster could be quite high. Outsourcing your network operations to experts in the technology will inevitably reduce your operations costs and liability in the case of a disaster.
While all of these tips won't guarantee that your business remains operational during severe conditions, Laezza says they do provide a useful framework around which you can prepare for the worst.
