RIM is hardly the only network that has been effected by technical or physical glitches.  ALL networks have been down from time-to-time and thus effecting millions from being able to access critical information or relay important data.

However, as we grow more and more dependent upon our communications services and especially mobile devices ALL companies need to start planning for the inevitable today.

So how do you plan for such outages?

Some companies we work with have a contingency plan that they’ve put into place for  some instances.  The larger the company, the more apt they are to have those plans in place.  Major corporations especially are typically good at making sure should their critical communications services such as an emergency contact line, toll-free numbers and multiple carriers with separate entrances into a building have been planned for.

But what about the less than mission-critical applications?

Are other departments within your organization building up a dependency on seemingly unimportant aspects of your communications infrastructure?  Say for example marketing has built an application for a smartphone that relays time-sensitive information back to sales for inventory management.  Sure it’s important and you know that it’s critical, but what IF the carrier that hosts that application suddenly disappears?  Or critical text messages you assumed where stored on your phones actually were kept on the network and they’re all lost?

You MUST find the weaknesses within your network first and plan for all contingencies else you’ll find out in the long run that you have  a headache you never planned for.