Voice Continuity Planning within Public Sector

Under the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, all emergency services and local authorities have to actively prepare and plan for emergencies. An emergency can take many forms. By its very nature it is difficult to predict the impact it will have on staff and the organisation as a whole.

In a recent survey of emergency planners across local authorities, central government departments and agencies, 72% of respondents agreed that voice services are an essential service to maintain during a disruption. Conversely 68% of respondents stated that staff could not continue to be contacted using their normal office number if they were denied access to their normal place of work.
(to download full report please click here)

Resilient voice services are not just about infrastructure, more importantly it’s about people management. Many organisations rely on mobiles or simple call divert for voice continuity. But this assumes staff will be able to dial-in to their office to set up a call divert. Experience of the disruption caused by the London bombings in July 2005, when mobile networks were shutdown, is evidence of the inadequacy of simply re-directing calls to mobile as a suitable solution.

BCP managers have traditionally used dial-plans to re-route calls; either to an emergency call handling centre or where possible to an individual. Even in non-disruptive times the probability is that at any one given point in time the data is not 100% accurate. Furthermore, during an incident calls volumes typically increase and can swamp capacity, so even then there is no guarantee that important calls reach the right person in a timely manner.

BT SmartNumbers delivers a powerful but simple telephony divert solution that distributes voice, fax and data services ensuring that calls to your employees will always be delivered DDI by DDI, no matter where they are located - such as another office, a disaster recovery site or to a mobile phone.

Unlike other Business Continuity services, Directed Recovery delivers voice calls and faxes to alternative numbers, DDI by DDI, without the need for dedicated hardware or software to be installed on site or in the local telephone exchange. Diverted calls may be distributed across any type of network to any dialable number. These include dedicated DR sites or possibly reciprocal arrangements with partner agencies, satellite offices and homes numbers.