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Disaster Recovery
To ensure our customers are adequately protected in the event of a disaster that would affect WCSs facilities, WCS has developed a Disaster Recovery Team consisting of senior and experienced representatives from all functional groups of the organization. This group reviews, validates and enhances the WCS Disaster Recovery Plan. The Plan covers procedures, Central Office and Network outages, PBX failure, Data Center failure, and loss of workspace.
Procedures
At the onset of any disaster that affects the quality and availability of service to our customers, the NOC acts as the first level of disaster assessment and decisions as it relates to assembling the Disaster Recovery Team. The Team gathers information as to how many customers are affected, the number of circuits affected, number of T1s affected, the areas & LATAs involved, departments impacted, list of essential customers, Estimated Time of Repair (ETR), and damage control. The Team then develops an assessment summary report to determine the impact, develop an action plan, and then start moving towards recovery.
WCS has developed a database of information that is continuously reviewed and updated for all of WCS’s switch locations and IT processing facilities. This information consists of employees and contact information for each location, vendor names and contacts accompanied by an escalation list, type of equipment installed, back-up service (i.e. power generation), and all other relevant information.
Central Office & Network Outage
In the event of a data network failure, WCS has a Preventative Maintenance Plan that requires all customer information, to be backed-up continuously and stored at an off-site location. Additionally, WCS is prepared to review all alternative routing schemes, network schemes and back-up databases.
Each of WCS’s switch sites has diesel back-up power sufficient to carry the full load of the switch site during a commercial power failure. In the event of a diesel failure during a commercial power failure, there is an average of four-hours or more of battery power for our switches.
Testing & Exercise
On a quarterly basis, the Disaster Recovery Plan is updated to ensure the accuracy of the escalation list and contact information as well as the assignments and responsibilities of those on the Disaster Recovery Team. WCS also ensures that the updated procedures are circulated to everyone on the Team, as well as other critical individuals in the organization, and request those individuals to keep a copy of the updated Plan at an off-site location (home, car, etc.)
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