[VoiceOps] Disaster Planning & Continuing Operations in a Lockdown World

[Peter Beckman]

We're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

I just saw that South Africa is now in a 21-day lockdown, and it got me
thinking: are my service providers ready to get engineers to physical
plants should there be outages?

Now South Africa announced an exemption for "those involved in the
production, distribution and supply of ... telecommunications services"

I'd be curious how they will differentiate people in telecom, given the
lack of centralized badges. Will a business card do it? What about small
telecoms who don't have "official badges" for access control, just a
business card and a ring of keys?

Given that, I've started asking my telecom and hosting providers what their
plans are should their local, state or federal government issue a similar
lockdown.

I've got a datacenter nearby that has some services that are essential to
providing our telecommunications services. Will a business card and Gov't
ID get me through a checkpoint if a lockdown is issued?

I'm glad to see that telecom services are exempted, but it will be
interesting to hear from all of you if non-911 services like Skype still
count as telecom services and will likely be exempt.

Obviously 911 services and mobile service is considered critical, but what
about my home phone service, which is handled through a VoIP carrier? What
about my FIOS broadband? Critical? I do hope so!

And also interesting, do hosted server providers also count? E.g. if you
have servers and services deployed on AWS in US-East-1, and are a telecom
service, and northern Virginia is locked down, do AWS employees traveling
to Datacenters get a pass? Do all datacenter techs?

I hope so, but it also worries me. Phone Numbers are a single point of
failure; I can work around server outages, but I cannot really solve issues
where my carriers or multiple hosting providers go dark.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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