Government resilience
Business continuity and its public sector equivalent,
government resilience, is one of the most pressing requirements
facing IT managers today.
Having a government resilience plan makes sound financial sense.
It protects against loss of revenue, provides confidence to
citizens and protection for staff. In some cases, a government
resilience plan will be a statutory requirement. If handled
correctly, government resilience will add value to the day-to-day
operations of a public sector organisation.
Why do I need government resilience?
In the banking industry business resilience is considered so
important that legal regulations dictate how it is implemented in
house. However, for local government the rules and
regulations are not so stringent, and yet the implications of a
network failure without sufficient backup systems in place does not
bear thinking about. A single communications network entails
significant and prolonged risk.
High profile terrorist attacks; natural disasters and accidents
have placed the spotlight firmly on the security and robustness of
government institutions. Citizens need to have a council that is
responsive to their needs. The highest goal for government
resilience is that citizens never notice a difference in the
services they have come to expect no matter what the situation. In
this sense “always on” communications and scalability have to be
the watchwords for local council IT managers.
The technology and its implementation
Our networks are built with resilience in mind and many of our
council and emergency services customers benefit from multiple
connections so that in the unlikely event of one going down,
services can seamlessly divert to the backup. The level of
resilience can be tailored to meet your individual needs. It’s the
stability, scalability and availability of the network that is key
to government resilience as it underpins the communication process
– facilitating data transfer relating to emergency and enquiry
calls. If network connectivity is destroyed, local council and
emergency services are likely to be critically hit.
As we have our own Next Generation Network stretching across the
UK we don’t need to rely on BT’s network. This means we can offer a
viable, independent alternative, providing true network backup and
strengthening government resilience.
Ethernet networks also address the question of scalability as
bandwidth can be increased quickly and painlessly at the request of
the customer. West Midlands Police – the UK’s second biggest police
force – uses our Metro Ethernet VPN solution, to provide an
advanced network that reaches out to all 120 sites in the region,
ensuring scalable and reliable bandwidth to meet its needs now and
in the future. Councils and emergency services equipped with
Ethernet can drastically ramp up their bandwidth capabilities in
case of disaster to meet two distinct needs. They need to be able
to respond to peaks in citizen enquiries and cope with increased
data traffic diverted from affected sites. And that’s the key;
government resilience is not just about a back up in the event of a
line going down, it’s about total support in the event of the
unforeseen, including being able to add further equipment or
bandwidth quickly and flexibly to meet unexpected traffic peaks or
issues.
In the event of a disaster, an Ethernet or IPVPN network enables
organisations to centralise their IT and replicate data from
whichever of their sites they choose. Citizens’ enquiries can be
answered without delay. Local council employees should be able to
work from home and log onto their VPN, safe in the knowledge that
the network is secure and work can continue as usual, albeit
off-site. The authorities and the citizens they serve needn’t be
left in the dark in the event of a natural or man-made
disaster.
How do I go about government resilience
implementation?
There are three key elements to preventing prolonged downtime in
the case of a disaster:
• Resilience - To prevent the wide area
network (WAN) becoming compromised, resilience is required. This
means in the first instance that there would be two backup paths to
sites holding mission critical data or applications. This would
guarantee up time should a JCB in the council car park
inadvertently cut through one of the lines. Two separate routers
should be onsite to avoid any single points of failure.
• Security - Privacy is a key element of
security, ensuring that outsiders cannot access data. Private lines
ensure that there is no opportunity for loss of data in transit.
Making sure that data is encrypted adds a further layer of security
for traffic on WANs not using private lines, as does the deployment
of advanced firewalls. Data storage is also a key factor and
company information needs to be backed up on a regular basis and
stored off-site so organisations can continue with business as
usual.
• Intelligence - Organisations need
management tools that give visibility of network traffic to prevent
service dropouts and rebuild damaged data paths quickly in the
event of an
emergency.
The practical challenges
Preparation is the key to delivering for a comprehensive
resilience solution. Many organisations underestimate the risk of
an event occurring that will disrupt telecommunications. The
reliability of modern telephone networks and telephony equipment
inevitably lulls many into a false sense of security. An
organisation can become aware of just how vulnerable they may be by
conducting a business impact analysis. By working together
with your service provider to identify any weaknesses you can
design network resiliency, security, scalability and failover
solutions appropriate to your specific needs. This helps with
deciding from the start what systems are right for your situation,
the practicalities and the financial burden they may incur in the
short term are the core challenges facing IT decision makers.
The public sector needs to take its lead from UK
business
The effect of prolonged downtime or loss of private data can be
damaging, not just for the council’s reputation, but to the
citizens it’s charged to protect. The moral? Prepare for the worst,
even though it may never happen. It’s the responsibility of those
employed by the public sector to ensure that their systems are
robust enough to handle anything that can be thrown at them. True
resilience is therefore critical to delivering today’s
citizen-centric services.
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