“I could not reach top police officers for about 15 minutes after Wednesday's triple bombings due to a shocking and unacceptable communication breakdown.” — Maharashtra Chief Minister (July 2011)

“Mumbai floods disrupted the communication networks for several hours.” (July 2005)

“BSNL receives over 46,491 complaints a month — a majority of which are about breakdown of Internet and phone services and disruptions in the cellphone network in Pune.” — News report (April 2012)

Technical failure, a natural disaster or a terrorist attack can cause the breakdown of information and telecommunication infrastructure, resulting in economic chaos and social disorder. Even epidemics such as swine flu, plague or bird flu can lead to interruption of service. A robust communication network is all the more critical during national emergencies such as a terrorist attack or cross-border war.

Businesses depend on telecom services and devices such as laptops and dongles to work in a seamless and flexible environment, whether from home or an outstation location. Several small, medium and large enterprises are migrating to cloud computing. Considering how critical IT is to most enterprises, this could pose several risks.

While communication networks have a high level of reliability in normal circumstances, disasters can lead to prolonged outages lasting several days or even weeks. Disruption on this scale causes enormous loss of business revenue and reputation among customers, suppliers and shareholders.

continuity planning

Telecommunications are the lifeline of today’s businesses. From ticket reservation centres to stockbrokers, businesses depend on telecom network. Even 24/7 emergency services such as fire brigades and ambulances, the defence industrial base and the Government cannot run effectively without telecom services. Like power and water, telecom is a critical national infrastructure for transportation, power, finance, and other basic industries. All of these rely heavily on the communication network (voice, data, Internet) to do business.

In today’s high-tech telecommunications environment, phone/Internet outages are inevitable. Hence, businesses have realised that the telecom lifeline can be very fragile.

Are we prepared with a Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan?

Telecom is a critical link that must not be neglected in any business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Proper disaster management techniques can prevent business from grinding to a standstill the next time phone lines are dead. A few safeguards and adequate planning can lessen the impact and minimise the dangers of such disruptions. Telecom product companies such as Avaya and Cisco focus on fail-safe systems that can handle outages without impacting the end-user.

Power failure has a cascading effect on telecom services. As utility power systems periodically fail due to technical reasons, telecom companies must provide backup power sources at the switching, transmission, and control facilities.

As a key infrastructure, pivotal to all others, understanding and modelling the risk due to communication disruption is a high priority, in order to enhance both public safety and infrastructure resiliency. Some of the steps the Government could take while formulating disaster management regulations are:

Conduct stringent security audits of IT and telecom equipment;

Introduce measures that allow any affected operator to tap into the available bandwidth of other operators at a pre-negotiated price;

Increase awareness that any major disruption will lead to cascading failures;

Minimise the incidence of power infrastructure disruptions from affecting the wider communications infrastructure.

In the Yaksha Pariksha event in the Mahabharata, Yaksha asked Yudhishthira: “What is the most amazing thing in the world?” Yudhisthira replied: “The most amazing thing is that every day we see people dying, but we think we are going to live forever.”

In a similar vein, disasters are happening everywhere every day, but we think it will not happen to us!

Related Topics