UC and Disaster Recovery(2)

Transcript for UC and Disaster Recovery(2)

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant here with my UCStrategies colleagues and today we are going to talk about how unified communications can help companies stay productive even in emergencies like earthquakes, hurricanes, snowstorms and so on. The recent hurricanes impacting the East coast made me wonder how UC will enable people to work and stay connected and I remember right after the volcano eruption in Iceland a couple of years ago, there were lots of stories about people throughout Europe who couldn't travel and were using UC tools to attend conferences and meetings virtually, collaborate with colleagues, and still get their work done. And the same thing happened after the H1N1 virus when people didn't want to travel, and also when Nancy (Jamison) and I interviewed companies that were using remote contact center agents, a lot of them talked about how using remote agents let them keep their businesses operational when there were natural disasters or power outages in some of their locations. And again, these UC tools are really helpful in letting them still communicate and get their work done. And of course, if you lose electricity and your phone lines or your cell towers are down, this can be a lot more challenging. But the point is, UC can help people be productive and communicate with customers, partners, and colleagues from any location, and companies do need to consider UC as part of their disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.

Now most companies are prepared for power outages but not necessarily ready for natural disasters. That's the quote that I heard recently—that may or may not be the case—but the point is, companies have to be ready for everything and there are ways that they need to be thinking about this. I would like to turn this over to my colleagues to talk about how they see UC in terms of helping companies with disaster recovery and business continuity. Marty, let's start with you. How do you recommend companies look at doing business continuity and disaster recovery?

Marty Parker: Thanks Blair. Yes, you're exactly right about the importance of this. Terrorist acts have also heightened people’s sensitivity in the United States since 9/11 and in other countries and following similar events. I was involved in a project some years back on this very topic where it became clear that you can do some very effective structured analysis in advance of the disaster situations.

The first first thing in this structured analysis is to look at your business according to the type of business process and the types of assets and the importance to the business. So if it is something that you need to keep going in order to continue to serve customers now in order to continue to produce revenue now, or, if you’ve got a warehouse full of obsolete inventory, maybe an insurance policy is all you need to worry about. So you can look at the range of what you need to do in terms of its importance to your customers and to your basic economics. Then take that kind of a matrix and apply the various types of disasters—and just one at a time—walk through them. Okay, I'm going to have a record snowstorm; I'm going to have a hurricane sweep up to East coast; I'm going to have an earthquake in California or in Japan. Basically take that type of disaster in various grades: minimal, modest earthquake, major earthquake, those kind of things; and run the scenarios through and look at what you would need to do in each of those situations. Here is the type of disaster, what would I do about my important processes, my less important (processes), my unimportant processes? And you will find from that, that the new unified communications tools give you new options for response. I think our peers are going to talk about a lot of those ideas in a moment, but you can then lay out the options in advance and then do some training, some communication, provide people with sufficient information so that they know what's going to happen.

The most important asset of a company is its people, and the second most important is its customers. So some companies, the very first thing to do when a disaster kicks in is arrange for a logging system to track employee safety and availability. Are you available? Are you online? How much longer will you have power? Are you able to work, or not? They may be caring for flood control or something else, and not able to work even if they are available. So, you want to have a good thoughtful and people-sensitive process in place there.

And then once you’re past that, the last thing I'll say is, often, it was found that for things that are really of high value and high importance, you will want geographic diversity. So most of our customers are already, or are now when they buy new systems, doing that. For example, we have a major health care products company that has a headquarters in California. They have a fully redundant center out in Ohio. We have a company on the Atlantic seaboard that has a fully redundant communication center in a hardened facility out of reach of the first location. Those kinds of redundancies. Some companies do redundancy across continents. If I'm out in North America then people on the Internet can get routed over into Europe and maybe I can even have telephone rerouted into Europe for support during that time. So it's that kind of modeling. How important is it, and if it's very important there are ways to plan forward, and spend the money in advance that will save you big money, and preserve your people and relationships during the disaster. I think we're going to hear people in a moment talk about things about presence status and softphones. One of our major financial clients has softphones loaded on everybody’s laptop so that during an outage they're able to communicate that way, certainly cellphones, and now that cellphones have web access on most of them, can be a business continuity tool. Website, shared workspaces, the ability to reallocate work, maybe some work allocation processes, all those kinds of ideas can be built into your response to a disaster. I’ll toss it back to you, Blair, and I think others are going to comment on the types of responses we’re seeing.

Blair Pleasant: Thanks, Marty. Nancy, you wanted to talk about the need for training and planning for things like social media?

Nancy Jamison: Yes, recently, we have had some of these natural disasters and it was interesting, you didn't see press releases on how people are embracing the use of UC in a disaster, but boy, do we hear a lot about embracing social media and I estimate that I was probably one of millions who followed Hurricane Irene on Twitter, and it was really interesting to see some of comments that Marty talked about: whether or not people were losing power, what was happening to them... So I think that as part of this planning that Marty talked about, that we should also embrace social media and start the conversation early, because I believe that even though UC becomes second nature when you have certain products that you can no longer live without, like presence, if you're used to social media and you're used to using it, the very first thing that you do is you want to talk to people about what's happening and so, an earthquake happens, we go and tweet about it and stuff like that. So why not embrace the use of social media from within those disaster plans such as, starting that conversation early, putting up a Facebook page when it looks like you are going to be hit with something that you know that you can control, the fires or the hurricanes; not an earthquake, we're not that good ...And then also potentially have a Twitter name for your employees to follow. Because when some of these things go out, it did appear even without power, that people were powering up their cellphones from the battery off of their notebook and extra batteries and stuff like that. A lot of the access to social media went on for longer than some of the normal things that we rely on. So I think that even though it's not a real typical UC product, that using different forms of social media should be integrated into those disaster plans.

Blair Pleasant: I totally agree. Russell, I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about outages, and you also worked on a survivable branch appliance at Microsoft. Can you talk about your experiences here?

Russell Bennett: Sure, thank you, Blair. As Blair said, I worked on a survivable branch appliance at Microsoft for three years, so we spent a lot of time thinking about outages and disaster scenarios of different types. One thing that is obvious for everybody but I’ll just state it anyway, is it’s really difficult to work around a multiple failure. It’s okay not to be able to get into the office because of the snowstorm, as long as you can communicate over UC and so on, but if you've got a power failure or there's an internet outage or the 3G, 4G network is down then you're in a multiple outage scenario. And there's not a lot you can do about it, so that just needs to be acknowledged up front.

The great thing about UC is the immediacy of it. The presence-driven features, the ad-hoc conferencing and so on, are actually ideal for a responding to any unforeseen circumstance, whether it’s the cancellation of the meeting, or a hurricane or flood or some other disaster. So UC is really great to do that and because you’ve got all these multimedia features, then you can continue working from home, providing you do have internet access, almost as if you're in the office and so it's great for that.

One thing that ought to be noticed about disasters is that disasters actually need responding to, it’s not just a question of, you can’t into the office; there's probably something broken, or failing, or damaged that needs to be addressed. And to the point I've already made, UC is great for that. A couple of UC suites, particularly IBM and Microsoft Lync do have third-party integrations with radio systems. The interesting thing about radio is that 2-way radios and push-to-talk mobile phones are used by mobile assets, mobile repair crews, and utility workers and so on and so forth. Whenever you’ve got an issue like a plant outage or some other kind of infrastructure failure, it’s those guys who aren’t necessarily UC-enabled who are going out and dealing with the issue. And yet, for the people back in the office, the managers and coordinators to be able to communicate with those guys is critical. So, the integration of those systems with radio is crucial and people should go and take a look at the solutions that are provided for Lync and IBM, like Twisted Pair Solutions. I'll hand it back to you, Blair.

Blair Pleasant: Thank you, Russell. Jason, you were in Europe during the volcano. Can you talk about what people were doing and what your experiences were?

Jason Andersson: Yes, really what happened during the volcano was Europe became completely isolated. Of course, you still had computer networks, and you could do video, but a lot of companies were not in the position that they had done the proper planning and investing that was necessary to make that happen. What they started to do is to look at other ways of making collaboration work across time zones, because you couldn't meet the normal way. So they started using things like pervasive chat, social media and systems such as Yammer and there are a lots of other systems that you can use, but it was internet-based, it was easy to set up, and people were quickly on top of it and people started using it, people in other time zones could actually join in the conversation after the fact, see what the conversation was about, provide their input, share files, and continue a discussion and be productive even though the volcano caused them to have to cancel travel meetings and customer setups and things like that. So I think disasters have a tendency of making us creative and this was one situation where European companies became much more creative than maybe they had been and forced to go into a social way of working much more intense than before.

Blair Pleasant: They might have gone in kicking and screaming, but they did go in and turn to these technologies.

Jason Andersson: Yes, absolutely.

Blair Pleasant: Don, do you want to join in and talk about some ways that people need to think through the use of specific UC tools in these type of emergencies and for their business continuity needs?

Don Van Doren: Sure, thanks Blair. I think one of the things that is interesting is that we've learned a lot of good lessons from the contact center industry and as companies have sought to make sure that their call centers are still accessible during times of emergency, and a lot of the tools that others have mentioned on this call are certainly used. The key challenge, of course, is getting connectivity, and it tends to be focussed on ways that external parties can connect into the company and I think one of the things that is imporant that we need to add to that, of course, is the notion of internal collaboration tools. And I think that some of the internal collaboration tools that people have mentioned here, audio and video conferences, shared work spaces, chat, there are also simultaneous and non-simultaneous tools that Jason mentioned. I think these kinds of things are all opportunities for companies to do it. It's important, obviously, that you get people used to them early on before the disaster happens. And so using these kinds of tools in the normal every day work environment is something that I think it is an essential component of making this happen.

One other thing that we haven’t mentioned yet, and that's about hosted services. One of the advantages of course of hosted is that it’s being provided by a company obviously in a different location than where your headquarters are, and so use of hosted services perhaps even as part of a back-up plan is something that a company is might want to consider.

Blair Pleasant: I definitely agree with that. Art, what do you have to add?

Art Rosenberg: I just want to make one observation. When it comes to a situation where there's a catastrophe of some kind, there are two areas you worry about. One is, things that are emergency kind of things, where people get hurt, there is suffering, or things are broken, etc., and that's one kind of continuity, if you will, that you want to preserve—to be able to fix things and help people.

The other thing is keeping business as usual. Even though the communications may be broken, people are not in their offices, but they should be able to have access to information. Not necessarily just to people, but to information... so you really need both and that's what UC does try to take care of. It’s watching what people need in terms of access to people and access to information. And especially, if you know that something is wrong you don't wait for somebody to call you and tell you something is wrong. You know that something is wrong with monitoring and you set up an automatic notification and delivery for people who are not aware that there's a problem, but you know there's a problem, and you want to get it taken care of as soon as possible whatever changes are requires.

Blair Pleasant: Dave, why don't you wrap it up for us and bring it on home?

Dave Michels: I have just a few thoughts—this has been a very interesting conversation. It seems to me that the amount of natural disasters is certainly on the increase...hurricanes, droughts, fires, tornadoes, etc., seem to be the frontline or the headline of the news pretty much every week at this point, it seems, around the world. I'm thinking of the big floods in Pakistan, the big fires in Moscow, all the way to the most recent events, it just seems that disaster recovery planning needs to be kind of pushed up a few notches as the likelihood seems to be higher.

Here in Denver, at my company, we had a big snow storm four or five years ago. They closed down the airport for about four days, and it was interesting to see how fragile society is when that kind of thing happens. The supermarket shelves were all empty, the trucks couldn't get in, the planes couldn't get in. And we had just deployed at that time, I think it was still called OCS, and I think we were all pretty impressed with how well we could communicate remotely between the different tools of that suite back then. With disaster recovery planning, there are two components of it: one is being able to work remotely, and the tools associated with remote productivity, everything from collaboration to conferencing to presence, IM, etc., and then of course there’s the infrastructure of maintaining that during a disaster and I think they're both equally important and I think the UC conversation generally pertains to the productivity issues at the desktop, and we've been focusing mostly on the data center issue.

The topic of hosted voice came up. I think it's a dangerous assumption to assume that your hosted voice provider is going to be reliable, or have a disaster recovery plan. I think that a lot of the hosted service providers are fairly small businesses and haven’t figured that out themselves yet. But in general, small businesses don't deal with disaster recovery planning. We were just doing a recent study on that with UPS software on various small system PBXs, and I was talking to dealers and they said no, small businesses just don't buy any kind of disaster recovery. I was kind of surprised that it's still the current norm, and I think that going back to my first point, that that needs to be turned up a notch.

I think that both virtualization and the systems that do the dynamic data replication are going to become much more important in the back office or the infrastructure. I put up an article on UCStrategies last month (Virtual Evolution) with the different degrees of virtualization and being able to actually restore your entire image, completely independent of hardware, I think is a big step and important one that we're looking at. So you don't have to have like hardware to restore to, and database replication of course but that there’s no one point of failure. (This is) the kind of stuff we've been hitting on for a long time at UCStrategies. The technology is getting there, but I think we just need to keep on getting it turned up higher on the priority list and on the planning cycle.

Blair Pleasant: Great, all good points. Well, thank you to the UCStrategies team and hopefully companies that haven’t done so will start planning for disasters and emergencies and we'll be better prepared and will also use the UC yools to keep communicating and to keep collaborating with colleagues, partners, and others. So, thank you everybody and see you next week.