Why Business Continuity is the final puzzle piece to Workforce Management
Minimising disruptions and using technology to easily divert calls to the right, available number. An important element of all business operations, but one that is often misunderstood or incorrect.
The importance of having a plan.
Over nearly 30 years, I’ve experienced many different critical business disruptions – from the builders breaking the fibre optic, to the complete loss of power to a building, and a major Telco outage. Of course, we’ve learned things on the way. Yes, someone does need to ensure your generator has fuel, and if there are guys in orange jackets looking sheepish then they probably broke something. But equally, if you happen to be standing in front of the key equipment when the Telco goes down, you’ll likely get the blame, even if it has nothing to do with you.
The adoption of cloud services has changed our perception of disasters. Uptime SLAs of 99.9% or higher mean we are confident that services are always online (save perhaps for social media platforms). We are now disconnected from many of the old-school issues, as they have become the responsibility of our cloud service providers.
The most important thing is to have a clear plan that everyone understands.
In a world where we can now “live anywhere, work everywhere”, we expect that staff can relocate to other locations or pick up their normal duties from home in an instant. However, we forget that it takes time for our staff to get home or to a new site. In the event of planned or unplanned outages, such as in a dangerous disaster, we must remember that staff might not be keen to simply continue business as usual.
It is more important than ever to ensure plans are in place to minimise business disruptions. At nimbus, we are proud that Telstra’s chosen BRS for their VOIP/SIP offering is nimbus Hub. This allows customers to pre-build SIP diversion plans and be prepared to quickly react when the unexpected occurs.
Business Resumption Services – don’t let continuity cause you issues.
When disasters occur, even the best-laid plans don’t always run smoothly. Staff are making decisions on the fly to keep your business online as best and as fast as they can. Sometimes the speed and dynamics which get you back to operating as normal can cause disruptions further down the road.
Many years ago, a break in a fibre optic connection between our buildings was quickly fixed with a long length of CAT5 network cable bringing everyone quickly back to work. However, once the fibre connection was fixed, that same CAT5 network cable caused a routing loop that brought the network back to a halt again.
More recently, a planned outage to handle cloud service connectivity to SSL certificates in a KeyVault hit some unexpected hurdles and ended up causing the very same issue and outage it was intended to fix.
Businesses constantly change their operations over time and these changes might not always get recorded where they should. Take contact centres, where calls are quickly diverted when they have a site outage, only to restore the calls to a set of outdated numbers once the interruption was over. Causing further interruption to their operations.
nimbus Hub, Telstra’s BRS solution for VOIP/SIP, provides great solutions to these risks. With nimbus, we record all your current call divert and delivery points before we apply your planned diverts. Then, when your business is back to normal, you can quickly roll everything back at the click of a button to how it was before you started.
