No matter what system you are using,
TASterix® has a solution for you:
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 1:19 PM
Subject: Fargo Flood
Hey everyone,
As you all may have heard Fargo is experiencing a major flood. We are in an extremely protected part of the city, but are in the process of making contingency plans for our answering service in the event that we would be forced to evacuate. The chance of evacuation is very slim, but we want to prepare for the worst. We are looking for volunteers who would be willing to take a handful of our most important (medical) accounts at a moments notice. The requirements would be very simple, we are looking for name, phone number and a brief message. We would have only one to two points of contact and very simple dispatch procedures for these small number of accounts. Anyone willing would need to be able to program a very small number of simple accounts. We could give you just a minimum amount of information to dispatch our calls. Again, this is highly unlikely but we want to prepare. We would require your services for approximately 5-7 days. Anyone who is willing and able let us know and we can talk in more detail. Our river is expected to crest late tomorrow/early Saturday and we will be on high alert for approximately 3 days following. Thanks for any and all help.
Lindsi Wiser Manager, TeleSpectrum Communications, Inc.
Tel: 701-241-6744
Fax: 701-241-6798
Serving Our Customers for over 20 Years!
"We're Always Open!"
One of the most important aspects of these changing times is the ability to be on-line 24/7 and maintain Business Continuity whenever a natural disaster (hurricane, fire) or man-made (server crash/telco down) disaster strikes. This life saving functionality has boggled many TAS owners to the point of spending an enormous amount of money on a totally redundant system... but no more!
TASterix®, in association with the free downloadable software *Asterisk software, can now provide 24 hour Business Continuity no matter where you are located or what brand of TAS equipment you have. TASterix's 24 Hour Business Continuity Plan will allow your office to be taking calls within minutes of a disaster.
Q&A about Disaster Recovery and 24 hour Business Continuity:
(Taken from ATSI's list serve 2-12-09)Question:
(Paula Ford) Now excuse me for being a ray of darkness on a sunny day.... but didn't we just hear about a big fire in a server farm in TX called "the Planet".... seems a huge electrical bus went all smoky? The computers were fine, but they didn't have any wiring left.
So... co-locating, while it can be much more secure than your own office, it might not be that much more secure than having two offices widely separated which back each other up. Of course ask anyone who went through Katrina how far separated is "far enough".
How do we solve that problem?
Answer:
(Vince McGlone) Co-locating (whether in a data center, server center, NOC, or remote location) is a great idea but it does NOT take away the requirement of having complete redundancy for your office. As secure as co-locating is, you are adding another level to your disaster recovery plan.
For example, once you co-locate your servers, you are now extending dial tone and data to your office whether that is VOIP over public IP, Private Voice Network over MPLS, or dialing in via a DID number. Ultimately, you are doing nothing more than converting all of your staff to remote agents for costs starting around +/- $1000 per month for co-lo space, excluding equipment costs, vendor costs, additional redundant bandwidth costs, etc.
Here are some ideas of additional requirements everyone needs to think about prior to co-locating.
What happens if your "link" into the co-lo is severed?
Your link into the co-lo can be severed in many ways so what do you do in the event of your entire office loosing connection? This question ultimately needs to be answered by your techies and equipment vendor. Can your vendor provide overflow groups that calls will get dropped into after X seconds of hold time, then the calls are forwarded to agents on POTS lines? Can your agents log in and forward their calls to specific pots lines? Do you have Soft Phone capability into your co-lo if your agents disperse and work from home? Even if you can get the calls to your agents do they have application accessibility to dispatch the calls?What happens in the event a router or fiber link goes down at the co-lo? Is your co-lo close enough and do they have a conference room that your agents can move into and start answering calls?
Do you have bandwidth redundancy with Qos load balancing into your office in the event 1 fiber link is severed?
What happens in the event of equipment failure?
What happens in the event a T1 card or motherboard on your server goes down? In this event, you need to make sure your co-lo is close enough to get to and change the boards out. Most co-lo personnel will not aid in the event of equipment failure within your rack space so YOU need to get someone there quick. If you have spare cards, get them into the servers prior to starting the servers up, this way, if a card fails, someone can plug and play with your circuits into the spare cards, again this would be a question for your vendor.Do you have redundancy with your servers in your rack(s); meaning replication processes happening with real time fail safe cutovers? Again, this is a question you need to ask your vendors and determine what the prices would be... if these processes are even possible or available, and if so, are the prices manageable.
Financially is it worth it?
Everyone needs to look at the costs and make a determination if the RISK vs. REWARD is worth it!!! That is only up to you.In certain areas, Business Insurance may not meet your financial requirements, since there may be a 3-week deductible! Yes, I said a 3-week deductible. In many hurricane prone areas, you can acquire insurance for the value of the business; however, there is a time table deductible, which means if your deductible is 3 weeks and your service is down for 2 weeks and 6 days and 23 hours then you get NOTHING!!!!! If it is the last minute and your service finally comes up but you lose all your clients, you get nothing!
The one term that no one mentions when speaking about disaster recovery is 24-HOUR BUSINESS CONTINUITY, which is an integral part of Disaster Recovery. What does an Answering Service Owner really want? If you think hard about the question, it is not about saving equipment... it is about SAVING YOUR CLIENTS and REVENUE streams. So from a broader standpoint, BUSINESS CONTINUITY is more important for your business. You should have a Business Continuity Plan, which includes disaster recovery options. I have seen many cases where a service goes down and another service is able to take their calls such as what happened with Katrina. This is Business Continuity and disaster recovery is a part of Business Continuity.
Personally I believe the ultimate Business Continuity Plan allows for 24-hour redundancy and real time fail-safe procedures that can be achieved within reason for some sort of disaster whether natural or man-made, such as hurricanes or equipment failure.
Everyone needs to remember that I am not trying to scare or prevent anyone from swaying either way but I am a proponent of co-locating with redundant systems. However there are some serious questions that need to be answered prior to doing so, since more operational variables are now prone for failure possibilities.
Remember, your service is only as strong as the weakest link. It is up to you how strong you want to make that link?
Vince McGlone
TASterix®
Man-Made Disasters:
Business Continuity can be interrupted in a myriad of ways including terrorist threats, rail spills containing deadly chemicals, the flu, hitting a telephone pole and taking out the central office etc. Your customers are relying on you to maintain communication stability no matter what type of disaster situation arises. TASterix® has you covered.
Pricing:
Outright purchase:
You may elect to purchase off-the-shelf computer hardware, buy our TASterix software and downloading *Asterisk and you are ready to go. This program will provide pertinent account information on a secure server that has the ability to go online at a moments notice. It allows your operators to flee the disaster site and then log onto TASterix remotely to continue answering calls for your clients.Charges for Premise Owned Equipment:
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Dell Server(s) Starting at $2,500 - customizable
Asterisk FREE
TASterix Software Starting at $10,000
Tech Support Customizable (Monthly or Retainer)
Rent space on our Server:
Like an insurance program your customer base can be downloaded to a redundant server located in a secure, data center for just pennies per month giving you the ability to log on from any location at a moments notice.Charges for our Offsite Disaster Recovery:
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24-hour Insurance Connectivity: $25 per agent per month
- $50 per agent per day
- $30 per concurrent trunk path
- $0.08 per minute usage inbound and outbound
- FREE - Emailing / Texting
- 24-hour standby: $200 per month
- $400 per day (8 agents)
- $360 per day (12 trunks)
- $400 per day usage (5000 minutes)
** Discountable Rates will become effective after 36 hours of continual usage **
Either package will allow you the security and protection for your clients which they will thank you for should you need it during these trying times.
If you would like a demo or have more questions about our “Disaster Recovery” package, please call (800) 369-6126 and we will be happy to assist you.
Remember, you only need to get hit once, to “bring home” the importance of
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
Emergency Preparedness
for the Individual and their Family
We in the TAS industry have been bombarded with articles and information on “Disaster Recovery” & “Business Continuity” so this article will focus on the individual and their families. Because we are now witnessing so many Earth changes that seem to be gaining in strength and destructive power, we’ve decided that it was important to publish our recommendations on preparedness, especially in light of the fact that we have just had an answering service asking for help in late March 09 due to flooding in Fargo, ND.If you have not reviewed your own preparedness plan now is the time to do so. Remember it was only a few years ago that television networks showed millions of people attempting to survive in New Orleans and Texas after Hurricane Katrina. We are now entering a time frame where Earth changes are more severe and we need to take such changes seriously by having a business emergency preparedness plan.
What first comes to mind for most people when they think of emergency preparedness is probably a plan for continuing to provide the basic necessities – food, water and shelter – for themselves and their families, when disaster strikes. But although these things are vital, there is more to being prepared than the simple accumulation of such necessities and perhaps mapping out a basic plan for survival.
COMMUNICATIONS
When the power grid goes down for an extended period, for any reason, the ability to communicate with the world outside becomes critical. Without it, knowledge of the situation beyond your own home or business is left to face-to-face contact with others, often strangers who may or may not want to lend aid. Just look at what happened in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina flooded that city. Even the police, fire and emergency people were unable to communicate with each other – let alone answering services. People were literally in the dark, without power, or communications. Until we find ourselves without electricity, many of us don’t realize how much we depend on telephone, radio, television, newspapers, and the Internet to help us know what to do! Perhaps the most important thing we can do to prepare for disaster situations is to give serious thought to what we would do if some or all of these services become disabled.Many people now rely entirely on cell phones instead of the hard-wired phones that everyone had in the past. Hard-wired phones do not rely on electricity and often work even if the electric grid is down. Cell phone communications will only work if the cell towers are functional and the power to operate them continues. Even so, an average cell phone’s battery charge may last only one to a few days depending upon the usage. Without electricity the phones can’t be recharged. The only other way to recharge them would be in your car which may not be possible because of the circumstances. Telephone service provided through the Internet will also be susceptible to power failure since battery back-up will only last for 40 to 50 hours. Remembering that it took a week or more before people were rescued at the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it might be a good idea to keep at least one hard-wired phone line in your home for emergency purposes.
When electricity fails and phones of any type fail, the best way to keep in touch with what is going on in the world is with a battery-powered radio. Small, battery powered AM/FM radios are the least expensive way to ensure emergency reception during a disaster. Be sure to check your batteries on a regular basis and keep several spare sets with the radio.
Ham radio is another well-known system for emergency communication. When the power goes out, well-equipped ham radio operators are able to maintain a lifeline for days- even weeks. I suggest you check out who is a ham radio operator in your area. A good place to start is through the local emergency management office or the police department. Optionally, try the American Radio Relay League (www.aarl.org), as they may be able to network you to an active ham radio operator in your area.
POWER
In any emergency situation that causes a loss of power, having a back-up generator will give you the ability to have lights, heat, and if you have a well, water. For example, we have a 45KW Detroit Diesel generator, which supplies power to our office, home and barn with plenty to spare as it was used to power a hospital. We also have a back up solar/hydro-powered system as well as a wood-burning outdoor boiler that heats our hot water tanks, greenhouse, home and office and a portion of our barn – all on wood. So you may say that we are on overkill when it comes to back-up here in Montana, but we’ve had to use our back-up system for over 3 days at a time due to our remote location.If you live in an apartment or an urban area, you will have a whole different set of problems. If you can leave the area in an emergency, do so; the city is not the safest place to be in such situations and relief efforts will probably be over-burdened. If you are unable to get away, having a 72-hour emergency kit may be your only option until assistance arrives. In any case make sure you have a good supply of candles, flashlights and plenty of batteries.
MEDICINES
Something as simple as aspirin can become a rare commodity during a disaster. I recommend maintaining a minimum three-month supply of any prescription medicines as well as an adequate, fresh supply of any over-the-counter remedies your family might need. Take an inventory of your medicine cabinet and calculate the quantity and frequency of use for each item. You should have enough of each medicine to last you and your family for at least three months. Check expiration dates and rotate them as necessary. A large well-stocked first-aid kit is always a necessity both for your home and your car.CLOTHING
Depending on where you live, your clothing needs will vary widely. It would be wise to keep an appropriate selection of comfortable clothes and shoes, such as you might wear for camping in an overnight bag in your car, garage or closet. Know where it is in case you need to be mobile in a hurry. Regardless of your location, have a wool blanket on hand for each member of the household. In cold climates winter sleeping bags are recommended. Keep mid-calf rubber boots on hand and several pairs of wool socks – wet or very cold feet can lead to frostbite and disease. In warmer climates lightweight, waterproof walking boots and a wide-brim hat should be considered.FOOD AND WATER
I recommend a three-month supply of food for each member of the family. Establish a rotational system of canned, freeze-dried, or dehydrated foods in your pantry. Store the food properly out of sunlight and in a cool, dry place. Note the expiration date on each item and rotate your supply with newer stock on a regular basis.Drinkable water may be in short supply, depending on where you live. For the rural dweller, sediment filters and water purification tablets are good to have on hand. As power grids fail, even those with wells will not be able to access water without power, so an emergency generator capable of running your pump will be necessary. In addition, locate optional sources of water. As an example, we have a hand-dug well in the basement of our old home. We now have an old-fashioned hand pump for pumping water in case we might run out of power.
For city dwellers, drinking water will be a major concern because in most urban areas aqueducts feed water to homes and buildings. When geophysical upheavals or electrical failures cause a crisis in these areas, water will become more valuable than gold! Store a minimum of 3 gallons of water for each family member – enough for 3 days. During an emergency, water may also be collected and treated with antibacterial tablets (available where camping supplies are sold) when needed. Keep a plentiful supply of these tablets on hand, as your running water may be contaminated for some time, and boiling may not be possible.