Contingency planning for remote working during extreme weather

In years to come we might look back at the big freeze of January 2010 and see this as the time when the country really did start to get its act together to help make sure its workers could work properly from home. We’d have the obvious benefits of being able to keep operating when a weather problem occurs, and also be somewhat more green with reductions in travel and lowering the carbon footprint. We’ll still, I am sure share tales of being stuck at the office, having to abandon cars and having a reason to talk to our business neighbours. (Ours built a snow walrus outside our front door!)

M12 Solutions snow disruption experience

At M12 we have had our share of the dramas. Our plans to leave the office early before the expected snow on Tuesday 5th Jan was thwarted somewhat by ½ of the Solent Business thinking the same thing. There was then the earlier rain shower that washed away all the salt on the hill out to the motorway – cutting everyone off. When the snow did start to fall, it wasn’t just any old snow, the flakes were the size of an old half crowns. This laid inches of cover in no time at all. One staff member queued for over an hour to just move 150 yards before abandoning his efforts. So the 7 of us left in the office decided to lock up and visit to local pub. We also recced the hill out to the motorway and work out what we should do. 3 hours and a few snacks later someone had decided that keeping the Solent Business Park grid-locked for no good reason was not appropriate, and the hill was cleared and we ventured home. The M27 was eerily clear westbound, but stacked up bumper to bumper towards Portsmouth.

How we prepared for homeworking for ALL users

Our sales staff, support and some of our other staff members are used to working from home, and can forward their DDI to their mobile, access webmail and VPN into the office to access data on shared network drives day-to-day. However, we would need to prepare all of our staff to be able to operate in this manner.

• Our ShoreTel phone system allowed us to set our mobile phones and home telephones as remote extensions. This meant that any calls to our DDIs, NGNs or telephone would get answered. This also meant that we didn’t have to confuse our customers or suppliers with different numbers.
• Our phone system also allowed us to transfer calls from our mobile/ home phones to other users – all remotely.
• In terms of our staff using our IT network, VPN connections could be established from home, and users remote desktoped to their normal computer desktop to perform as normal.
• So all staff had access to the VPN, and all users forwarded their DDI to their mobile/ home phone.

And then our main business Internet connection fails

As if things weren’t tricky enough with the weather, our Internet provider decided to have a network outage as we left on Tuesday. This lasted until early the following morning, but repeated again the following day for a further 20 hours. This posed implications for our VPN and webmail for our homeworking. However we had another redundant fail-over Internet connection connected to a failover router. A new domain name was circulated to users, and we were all up and running again using the spare Internet connection link.

Summary

It is at times like this that we can properly appreciate the value of today’s technology when carefully set up. It can provide business continuity, mean that workers can keep busy and productive, as well as give that necessary reassurance to customers that life goes on, we can serve requests and respond when needed.

From a straw poll of the impacts our clients are experiencing include:

• Workers arriving late because of the time taken to thaw their car and get it onto a gritted road.
• People being unable to get out of their road due to ice and snow, so unable to get into the office and also people having to look after children because of the school closures.
• The compound effect, when you add to the list those who just won’t travel (because of AA advice perhaps)  we think that only 25% of most organisations are “at work” and “at the office”.

Quite apart from the obvious cost to the country in lost productivity we think that organisations should seize this as an opportunity to properly test through their contingency planning and back up processes, and then review where there are weaknesses. Obviously, M12 can help with Voice and Internet aspects as well as give useful advice from mobile phones to soft-phone integration.

Enjoy the snow, it might be a while before we get a freeze like this again.

M12 can provide solutions to help you now

Voice

• Install a Voice over IP phone system for easy homeworking, working with softphones on laptops, web client to initiate calls from office to remote phone (so that the office pays for the entire call).
• Available products: SpliceCom Phone System, ShoreTel Phone System

Data

• Install a high capacity leased line for times where upload bandwidth are important for lots of VPN connections
• Install our ADSL Failover service. Two ADSL connections, two different ADSL ISPs, two different core networks, same IP address, no problems.

Mobiles

• Let M12 Solutions help you understand which staff to give mobile phones, what type of package you need, what mobile network would be best, what the best deal is.

contingency planning, disaster recovery, snow, snow jan 2010, telecoms