Ready for IT earthquakes?

The recent earth tremor that hit South Africa last week has had many businesses asking themselves if they are prepared for any natural disasters. The Assurance Notification Manager solution is designed to help businesses by providing reliable communication in emergency situations.

I’m sure most South Africans have heard about the 5.5 magnitude earth tremor that hit central South Africa on last week and sprawled across various parts of the country. It was a scary incident for a nation that doesn’t experience extreme natural disasters and had it continued it for longer than it did (roughly a minute) many companies would have experienced serious disruptions to business.

This has raised questions about whether or not South African enterprises are emergency ready, in terms of notifying their customers about business grinding to a halt and keeping employees safe. When panic hits, plans must be in place to protect employees and customers need to be notified if you cannot provide the services they require. However, when all was said and done after yesterday’s tremor, it was business as usual.

A new solution that will assist businesses in covering all bases in an emergency is the Assurance Notification Manager from Sungard Availability Services. This automated data integration system provides situational awareness and reliable communication in emergency situations.

Assurance Notification Manager is a global emergency notification system powered by Send Word Now, a robust provider of emergency notification and critical communication services. The system allows crisis response teams to mobilise faster, keeping employees safe and connected and allows users to make critical business decisions quickly and effectively.

The product also includes mobile app capabilities for Apple, Android and Blackberry devices, has geo-enabled alerts using Google Maps and recipient address data to send location-based alerts. It includes two-way communication with responses tallied in a report for reference and on-demand conference bridging, allowing up to 200 participants to connect instantly without pass codes or dial-in numbers.

It is critical to have situational awareness measures in place in the case of disasters, such as power outages, IT disruptions, natural disasters or cyber-attacks. We need to devise plans that will not only allow us to communicate quickly and articulately with our entire employee base but will also keep us in touch with our customers at all times during the handling of a business disruption.

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