Communications

A strategy for communicating critical information to the right people at the right time is a crucial aspect of an effective business continuity plan.

Communications is core business

In an emergency event a combination of outbound and inbound communications is preferred. This enables the business to proactively deliver information to employees, clients and others and allows those persons to call in and retrieve information.

Telephony - via landline or mobile phone - remains the most important communication in an emergency situation. However there is ample potential to increase the versatility of voice communication and utilisation of alternate channels such as the Web.

Immediately following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon many people making phone calls to and from the stricken areas encountered busy signals and network congestion. Some couldn't even get a dial tone and many found their mobile phones inoperable. In contrast, e-mail messages managed to get through to their destinations, somehow unaffected by the emergency.

IP networks, since they are based on decentralised computing, are inherently resilient - some would argue much more so than circuit networks. Each individual packet of data on an IP network is labeled with its intended destination. If there's an outage somewhere then packets are re-routed around the blockage automatically.

IP networks are separate and parallel to circuit networks providing essential resilience and redundancy. Web chat and web voice offer alternatives to the telephone during emergencies.

VoIP networks [voice over IP] provide for full voice communication through the desktop PC. In the event of a circuit network failure, ordinary telephone calls can be routed to the VoIP network and delivered to the workstation. 

One of the advantages of the IP based technology is that it's based on commodity workstations, PCs running standard operating systems such as Windows 2000 or XP with off-the-shelf audio headsets. The PCs can handle all forms of communications [phone, web chat, web voice, video, e-mail and voice-mail] as well as business applications.

Specialist telephony solutions are provided to us by Contact Technology Limited.