Keeping communications snag-free: the potential damage from communication disruptions keeps escalating, and executives need to be aware of options that can keep the business going.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BUSINESS CONTINUITY

When a series of fiber cable outages disrupted Internet traffic in the Mideast and India earlier this year, the impact reverberated widely. Trading on stock exchanges was halted in Egypt, international bank transactions were cut off and India lost half of its Web capacity.

What was equally striking was the lack of assurances that similar events can't happen again. Fiber optic cables--the infrastructure that has powered the Internet into the most amazing communications medium the world has even seen--remain vulnerable to something as low-tech as a ship's anchor dragging along the seabed. In fact, just such an event near Alexandria, Egypt, was determined to be the source of one outage. As Martin Capurro, director of Global Product Management at Qwest Communications International, puts it, "In the short run, a boat anchor in the wrong spot can interrupt service to 20 percent of the world."

Other telecommunications technologies, including wireless Internet and leased private lines, can ride to the rescue when such outages flare. But in the larger picture, companies from Main Street to Wall Street need to be aware of the growing array of options available to them to keep communications open--and business running--in the event of any disruption or disaster, whether manmade or natural.

For multinational companies, that might mean international leased private circuits (ILPCs) or satellite communications in the event of a major disruption. For a small private company, it might be something far simpler, like access to a second data center or a mobile van, subcontracted by a major telecom company to provide power backup, parked near the site of the problem.

"It's a judgment call as to what's good enough," Capurro says. "You have to balance that determination with what data integrity and availability should be. Just having this discussion puts the CIO [chief information officer] and the CFO on the hot seat. The minute there is a problem, those people have a lot of exposure."

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He adds: "We are seeing that data protection and business continuity are fairly well understood, and the price points are getting better. The hard pieces are the security overlay on top of that--we're still learning things from 9/11 ... The amount of reduction in legacy tool costs is being offset by the new costs associated with security," which includes encryption of data.

Not surprisingly, effective backup plans are built around simulated disasters. "You...