The Seven Steps to Successful Business Continuity Communications

Traditional methods of notifying people during a crisis, such as manual call trees and basic alerting systems, are no longer adequate for supporting increasingly vulnerable organizations. Broadening the scope of business continuity, organizations are taking measures to implement reliable, flexible, inbound and outbound communications, aimed at connecting and protecting both their infrastructure and people.

According to the National Institute of Technology and Standards (NIST), “the inability of first responders from many different agencies to communicate and share data greatly hampered the emergency response to the events of September 11.”

Emergencies can widely vary in severity—ranging from natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorist attacks to local food-borne outbreaks and power outages—but their outcomes are often all too similar: a crippled infrastructure, severe financial loss, and even loss of life. While high-profile incidents like Hurricane Katrina are infrequent enough, even disasters at the micro level can cripple an organization. For example, digital attacks, including worms and viruses, have reached record levels in recent years, numbering close to 20,000 virus types and causing more than $8 billion in damage a year worldwide.