GemaTech Industries.

All organisations include contact telephone numbers on their corporate web sites and all companies, who actually think about it properly, acknowledge that their business would be adversley affected if they were unable to receive incoming calls from their “customers” – the people they serve.

In an industry survey commissioned in 2005 by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems in association with Business Continuity the Risk Management Expo 2005 one of the key findings states “One fascinating result of this survey is how telecoms protection is almost a blind spot in the planning of many businesses. If asked to think of something adverse happening to their business very few people [less than 2%] spontaneously think of telecoms failure. But when directly asked nearly all acknowledge that it’s one of the gravest threats of all” When dealing with Protecting Reputation the survey went on to say “16% of respondents have a strategy with provision for protecting the company’s reputation though a much larger percentage (57%) have some sort of crisis communication plan. This area is clearly not well planned for by many organisations...........very few organisations have considered that telecoms failure would in itself present a grave threat to their reputation and at the same time would make it very hard to roll out any crisis communication plan. More than 70% of respondents agree that failure or loss of telecoms could well threaten their overall reputation but for the most part their plans for protecting reputation are based on the assumption that telecoms are working fine”