Text Box: Page 3 ò Return to Page 1 Text Box: STC LINES—January 2006 Text Box: Business Continuity Planning and the STC Consultant (From Page 1) Text Box: Client Perspectives The ability of a network to stay up and running under almost any circumstances is not a new concept. Even basic principles of network design incorporate protections to sustain a communications network. However, it takes a so-called 100-year event such as Hurricane Katrina to test the extent to which standard safeguards become inadequate and extreme safeguards become necessary protection elements. For end user clients, last year’s disruptions became visible evidence of how unseasoned judgment and perhaps too much cost sensitivity can jeopardize an organization’s ability to function in a serious crisis. In this respect, lessons learned for users should include the danger of over reliance on the availability of the public switched telephone network (PSTN), over- dependence on the human factors affecting a network’s ability to operate, such as the sudden loss of a capable workforce, a lack of coordinated disaster assessment and response, and the obsolescence of a network in terms of its ability to adapt to a drastically changed operating environment, regardless of employee dedication. In order to measure these attitudes, Lines asked respondents to what extent their clients’ interest in business continuity planning appeared to have grown over the past 18 months. The respondents were asked to define business continuity planning as consulting work, either as

standalone or embedded tasks, that in some way in-volved network resiliency, disaster planning, needs analysis related to BCP, long-term power back-up, or design of fault tolerant networks.

       Specifically, the survey asked which one of several carefully worded statements best described client inter-est in business continuity planning over the past 18 months, in the southeastern U.S. and elsewhere.

       Figure 2, below, shows the distribution of respon- ses, and includes abbreviated versions of the response options. This metric is sensitive to trends in BCP work.

       Just over 53% of the respondents who are active in this area (17 of 32) perceive an increase in BCP work since the summer of 2004. Hurricane Charley reached  the western coast of Florida on August 13th of that year.

Design Versus Legacy

As some respondents pointed out in the survey’s comment fields, BCP work is an inevitable part of  almost every project. From this perspective, any   increase in client interest in BCP becomes a matter        of project emphasis and cost allocation.

In the case of legacy networks, the question be-comes the adequacy of current measures, either just       in terms of network performance, or in conjunction    with BCP as an enterprise-wide strategic initiative.

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