To help public agencies comply with the federal government's Continuity of Operations mandate, Cisco recently announced its VirtualCOOP Solution and MeetingPlace Crisis Management Application at the Federal Systems Expo in Washington, D.C.

COOP requires all federal agencies to develop a plan for continuing operations during and following a disaster, and the ability of employees to telework is crucial. Last June, President Bush issued a directive outlining COOP objectives. Steps include identifying alternative operating facilities, providing interoperable communications, and validating the capability through tests.

Cisco breaks down its VirtualCOOP Solution into four parts:

• Network (component, device, solution and system-level redundancy).
• Application (data center solutions, content-delivery services, storage networking and data replication).
• Communications (distributed, central office-based gateways and distributed call centers with integrated messaging).
• Workforce (wireless integration, office-in-a-box products and telework).

"This is like mesh COOP," says Christopher Baum, an analyst at Gartner. "If you start distributing the network, you get huge disk repositories supporting individual people at remote locations. You need a system for bringing them together in a method that's recoverable and actively self-managing. So when you lose a node on the mesh you don't lose the entire mesh. There hasn't been the technology before to do this."

Cisco's VirtualCOOP Solution relies on current (and emerging) Cisco technologies, such as VPN tunnels connected to high-availability networks. The MeetingPlace Crisis Management Application is new, and was developed by Cisco and Apptis. The product lets federal agencies and state and local police and fire squads establish a permanent conference bridge for VoIP communications. When a user calls in and types in an ID code to establish the bridge, network resources are dynamically allocated to the connection.

Cisco leaves the people aspects of agency resilience and COOP - succession planning and teleworker training - to partners Accenture, IBM, HP and Northrop Grummand. Partner SAIC is conducting a trial (setting up Cisco VPN connections and VoIP phones) with a civilian government agency, says Chris Shenenfiel, Cisco's federal industry solutions manager.