"Planners Prepare, Survivors React"^SM

Corporate Disaster Planning

When an event occurs that impacts data and telecommunications services, a company must determine the severity of the outage and the prospects for the firm to continue business operations.  A comprehensive Disaster Preparedness Plan will help identify intelligent responses to potential disaster and will also identify:

• Major Component Replacement Requirements 
• Redundancy of Equipment Locations, Capabilities and Capacity 
• Availability of Alternative Services 
• Network Re-route Availability 
• Employee Preparedness

S3GC can help determine strategies and alternatives in advance of a disaster and suggest escalation procedures to help a company respond to significant service outages.  The Disaster Preparedness Plan also develops predetermined tradeoffs between acceptable performance levels, business impact, disaster probability and disaster recovery expenses.

One key learning is that the corporate teams for life safety should not have members who have the additional responsibility for equipment or facilities response.  We strongly suggest that the  life safety team should have the safety and preservation of life as their sole focus.  In turn, first responders and government agencies have authority over either set of teams.

Elements of assets and facilities disaster preparedness (such as diversity of local access circuits and intra-building wiring) are incorporated into a redundant network design to eliminate potential single points of failure.  A well designed network is the first line of defense to accommodate potential service outages, but network design alone may not be sufficient to remedy events such as extensive power outages, floods, severe storms and explosions.  An essential part of any recovery system is to ensure that a formally documented Disaster Preparedness Plan is in place.

A team of well-trained employees can mitigate the effects of a catastrophe and its aftermath.  An in-house disaster response team can mobilize and assess the cause and extent of an outage and choose the appropriate escalation procedure for that outage.  In some cases, notification of a vendor is sufficient.  In other cases, personnel should be given instructions as the restoration process begins.  Advance preparation for disasters can be documented in a Disaster Planning Manual and placed in the hands of key employees.

A Disaster Preparedness Plan is a document that details all the required steps, points of contact, and team responsibilities in the event a disaster should incapacitate a company's ability to perform customer service and/or other essential business activities.

The Disaster Preparedness Plan supplements a redundant network design by identifying predetermined responses to technical problems and natural events (environmental, system or process problems).  Standby service, alternate site arrangements and backup recovery services for critical hardware and software are also part of a Disaster Preparedness Plan. 

Modified in 2007.