Communications In A Crisis: Are We Ready?

The discussion of telecommuting and telework options always drifts to the forefront when topics of wide-scale disaster, potential pandemics, or any other far-reaching crisis arise. The mass media frequently identifies the use of telecommuting and telework solutions to support the 24/7 business climate that the world is accustomed to.

What is often forgotten, however, is the critical infrastructure and the thousands of people that are required to support it from end-to-end. Whether it is internal organizational IT staff, to the many network operators, ISPs, and hosting facilities that serve up such critical services, these details are often forgotten.

I read an interesting story on the Internet Storm Center website (ISC), by Johannes Ullrich that outlines the situation quite well.

Lots of news about the Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico. Right now, cases are reported in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Spain. We have covered pendemic preparedness before, so let me just list a few pointers and a couple highlights:

- don't count on locking up your NOC staff in the NOC. They want to be home with family. Be ready to operate in "lights out" mode remotely with minimal or no staff.

- everybody will try to do the same thing. Cell phone data connectivity and broadband internet connections may be overloaded at times. Panic breeds inefficiency.

- don't panic. Try to find news reports and don't fall for the hype some news media will spread to attract viewers. Stick to reputable sources (www.cdc.gov and such comes to mind).

Johannes is absolutely right. The public of the world tend to ignore requests by officials to reserve precious communications infrastructure (bandwidth, PSTN circuits) for emergency uses. Obviously, we're not nearly at the point of such a crisis, but the public, organizational IT staff, mass media, and network operators should always keep these ideas in the back of their minds.

A resource as simple as 'dialtone' is often forgotten during a crisis situation. The hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of people that support the end-to-end connectivity of the telephone and data networks of the world are important. The management, support, and upkeep of this infrastructure is NOT automatic. Telework and remote communications solutions are a great idea in disaster response, but is it really that simple?

• General discussions
• Network Management
• VoIP / Convergence
• Wireless / Mobile