At this point, I think I've read enough scary warnings about possible infrastructure problems during the London Olympics that I'd like to make business continuity headaches a whole new event at the games.  The latest one comes from the Cabinet Office via the Guardian warning British businesses that they might see disruptions in their internet connections during key points at the games. Everything from full on outages to bandwidth caps are on the table. 

The good news is that the warnings are being put as well as good general guidelines on how to prepare your business for the Olympic games.  The possibility of internet disruptions is a good exercise to run through for business continuity professionals.  Let's consider the impact and explore alternatives from a few different perspectives.

If you are a business continuity professional tasked with managing communications for incidents, how would an internet outage impact you?

• With no internet access, you could only initiate communications from a mobile device, or by using calling your notification vendor's call center
• To get updates on how many people had received the messages, what their responses were, or any other report, you would again have to rely on mobile access, or contact the vendor's call center

To actually get messages such as "work from home today" or just provide updates during the games to employees, you must have diversity in your communication channels:

• Internet disruptions mean email becomes less reliable, both on the sending and receiving side.  If an employee loses internet access at home, they're certainly not going to get your messages.  If you (or your email provider) lose internet access, that's even worse for getting information out.
• SMS is a great way to get short messages to people, but it's also not guaranteed to work as communication infrastructure gets overloaded.  You could see everything from delayed delivery, to messages not making it to their recipients at all.
• Phone calls, with options for both land lines and mobile phones, are another good alternative to disseminate information
• Call centers where employees can call in to retrieve information can provide another "pull" mechanism
• Get the message out using social media, where appropriate

When communication systems become unreliable giving people the ability to respond becomes even more important.  You can't rely on service provider updates that confirm receipt to the system, but not the actual individual.  That's true of email, and SMS in some cases.  Even simple responses such as "I got the message" will make reporting far more reliable.

If you'd like to share your business continuity team's approach to dealing with communication disruption during the London Olympics, sound off in the comments!

Abbas.