Recovery Plan

Recovery Plans and Standards for Wireless Communications

Florida Institute of Technology Wireless telephones and the technology that supports them have evolved at an incredible pace. In the modern era, wireless telephones are considered by many to be an additional appendage. Not only do they make it possible to speak to people 24 hours a day, seven days a week, many also enable contact via text messaging and the exchange of photos and video. Additionally, smart phone technology has turned the mobile phone into a portable lifestyle assistant, enabling internet access from practically anywhere with a cellular signal as well as personal schedule storage, email transmittal and retrieval, and even gaming. Arguably, the most important function of a mobile phone for a business is the ability to communicate with customers at any time. However, few businesses have standards and procedures in place for emergencies in which cellular service is disrupted. This can cause big problems for a firm, particularly if they use mobile phones as their primary means of communication with clients. Wrobel and Wrobel (2010) provide suggestions that firms can use to prepare for an emergency involving cellular disruption that is, while somewhat unorthodox in places, a potentially cost-effective means of ensuring seamless communication between businesses and their clients.

In part one of a two-part article, the first suggestion Wrobel and Wrobel (2010) make is for businesses to have a backup plan in place in case of an emergency. The articles writers describe the backup/recovery plan they implemented for their own business, which involved modifying their mobile phones to use VoIP to make and receive phone calls over the internet in the event of a cellular provider failure. Additionally, they were able to customize their outbound caller ID feature so that their customers would see their mobile numbers on their caller ID instead of the unknown VoIP number. With these contingencies in place, and assuming that internet access remains available in the event that the cellular provider experiences a failure, employees of the business can continue to make and receive customer calls while they are in the office.

In part two of the article, Wrobel and Wrobel (2010) discuss security standards for wireless devices. The advantage of predetermined standards-in-place is that it gives a firm a set of procedures to follow in the event of an emergency, whether a natural disaster or simply loss of the device, as opposed to panicked on-the-fly decision-making after an adverse event has already occurred. Additionally, standards can be used to outline appropriate conduct with devices and compatibility parameters that can help to avoid an emergency in the first place. Distribution of relevant emergency contact numbers and policies can also be managed electronically pushing updates to relevant wireless devices, which is far easier for a firm to accomplish when compatibility among wireless devices is not an issue. In this way, everyone has the same information and during an adverse event can more easily help the firm resume normal operations quickly.

One of the great advantages of automating standards and recovery procedures, according to Leo Wrobel, is that it makes it far easier and less time-consuming to keep them current and distributed to the appropriate personnel. Additionally, the ability to automatically "push" the most current documents and phone numbers upon update to relevant parties gives