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

[Alex Balashov]

It sounds like the real question here is:

Is government prepared to apply nuance and a deep comprehension of the supply chains and inputs into 21st century digital economy produces and services to its characteristically blunt execution and to the broadly categorical bureaucratic logic applied in such execution?

The answer is, of course, no. 

Consider how far the tax code has evolved to contemplate the possibility of businesses dealing in intangibles and digital intellectual property.

Should such a scenario come about, it’ll be case-by-case and up to you to convince the US equivalent of a village militiaman sat on a bale of hay bouncing a machine gun on his lap that you do something “essential”.

—
Sent from mobile, with due apologies for brevity and errors.

> On Mar 23, 2020, at 3:14 PM, Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
> beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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