Focus on Florida - Disaster Preparedness and Business Continunity Planning Workshop

The Disaster Preparedness Communications Forum (DPCF) was announced 15 months ago at ITEXPO West 2005. One year ago, at ITEXPO East 2006, the first official member meeting was held. During the past year, the DPCF has evolved into a much larger group and continues to provide educational information on the need and value of business continuity planning. Both the role of the DPCF and the contributions of TMC and the ECA will be expanded in Ft. Lauderdale to include a panel session on Wednesday, January 24th hosted by TMC’s Greg Galitzine (http://www.tmcnet.com/411.1) and a full workshop on Thursday January 25th (http://www.tmcnet.com/412.1).

Greg’s panel will focus on what an owner or operations manager of an enterprise needs to know to effectively prepare for the inevitable service disruptions that businesses experience from time to time. Although hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes come to mind when we think of the term disaster, major disasters are not the only causes of business interruptions. More common calamities, such as a building fire, ice storm, or vandalism can shut down a business just as quickly as a major disaster and wreak the same amount of economic havoc to the employees and the business itself. This panel of industry executives will discuss how today’s VoIP technology can keep your lights on, keep your phones operational, and keep your business connected. Executives from Inter-Tel, Iwatsu, and Mitel will participate in the panel and will be prepared to answer questions from the audience.

Thursday’s session will be a full three-hour workshop designed to help businesses create a safe, solid, and relatively easy-to-implement solution to ensure continuity of business in the case of a disaster of any size. The half-day workshop will host a selection of rotating speakers to address the most important issue for any enterprise — how to avoid a serious interruption of business operations. The session is structure for audience participation so come prepared with any questions you would like the speakers to address. Max Schroeder will moderate the session. Richard Grigonis, the Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group and the author of the Disaster Survival Guide for Business Communications Networks, will open the session and provide both an historical and current perspective on hardware architectures and faultless software designs. Other speakers include:

• C. Don Gant, VP Channel Marketing and Business Development, Iwatsu Voice Networks (http://www.itwatsu.com)
• Todd Landry, Senior Vice President, Sphere Communications (http://www.spherecom.com)
• Craig Toney, Southeast Sales Manager Enterprise, Cantata Technology Inc. (http://www.cantata.com)
• Mike Emerson, Senior Manager Security & Business Continuity Services, Infrastructure Services, Citrix Systems, Inc (http://www.citrix.com)
• Jim Taylor of United Space Alliance (http://www.unitedspacealliance.com)

The speakers will cover a wide range of business continuity and preparedness planning topics that will include both human and technological allocations of resources. A key factor in a continuity plan is to have all systems in place prior to any emergency and tested on a regular basis. In an emergency, there won’t be time for last minute deployments. For example, if you do not have employees working remotely as part of your regular operations, you will need to have an infrastructure in place to allow remote access during an emergency as a backup. Having a Citrix Presentation Server in place enables every application to be deployed through a standard Web browser, but you will still require a secure data and communications location. Basically, when architecting your company’s communication network, the plan has to include IP fax and converged communications to provide for added integration and location independence. Again, both human concerns and technology must be balanced for the plan to be successful.

In addition to the above, other members of the DPCF (as listed below) will participate.

• 3t
• Cantata
• CiBan LLC
• Cisco Systems Inc.
• EarthNet Telecom, Inc.
• ECA
• Eicon Networks Corp
• FaxCore, Inc.
• Forsythe Solutions Group
• Haines Brown Inc.
• Iwatsu Voice Networks
• KoolSpan, Inc.
• MSI Services
• MWB Business Systems
• One Touch Global Technologies, Inc.
• Progressive Communications Mgmt, Inc.
• Promero, Inc.
• Quintum Technologies
• SafeHatch, LLC
• ShoreTel
• Skyport International, Inc.
• Sphere Communications
• Standley Systems, Inc.
• Tadiran Telecom Inc.
• [email protected]
• TMC
• United Telecom Council
• Wiresoft.Net, Inc.

A reminder: to please visit http://www.tmcnet.com/33.1 to view additional information provided by DPCF members, TMC, and the ECA.

Max Schroeder is a board member of the ECA, media relations committee chairman, and liaison to TMC. He is also the Sr. Vice President of FaxCore, Inc. (news - alert)

Rich Tehrani is the President and Group Editor-in-Chief at TMC and is Conference Chairman of Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO.

If your organization has an interest in participating in the TMC/ECA Disaster Preparedness Communications Forum, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].