Operational resilience and business continuity compliance, for the finance sector, with Callmy alert.
08 November 2024
When you are a UK mutual building society, regulated and obliged to maintain service delivery for your customers, a failed Office 365 service can have very serious and far- reaching consequences.
For the company in question, not only did this affect their ability to maintain general business communications, but the Office 365 service was also used for all emergency communication, leaving them with no means to communicate quickly in a crisis.In this particular case, a fast-acting internal team was able to bring the service back in a relatively short space of time but the lesson was learned. Stakeholders realised the need for a more fool proof way to communicate in crisis and knew also that any viable solution needed to support, not only emergency communication, but also help the business to comply with FSA and PRA regulations.
As any outage would impact not only Head Office and branches but also remote users working from home due to Covid, there was a list of essential requirements any new comms system needed to deliver on.
OUR CASE STUDY’S EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION SERVICE REQUIREMENTS:
- Cloud based service “air gapped” from internal IT system.
- Secure and resilient delivery.
- The ability to send critical messages that guarantee a fast response – essential for invoking DR and emergency plans.
- The ability for users to respond to messages and for administrators to access real-time usage reports.
- Ease of use with a simple method to escalate communication to all staff and targeted groups.
- Ease of service management via integration with Active Directory.
- Access to document storage via the Management Portal – encrypted and cloud based.
- Access to message audit logs to help compliance with BS22301.
- Cost effective.
THE CALLMY ALERT SOLUTION
Instead of relying on old-fashioned email systems and SMS, Callmy Alert delivers its messages to a dedicated app that can be installed on end user’s smartphone, tablet and desktop. End users know that if they receive a message via Callmy Alert, something urgent is happening and they need to respond.
The service also has an ability to override end user’s devices, which may be set to silent or do not disturb. Message notifications repeat until the end user has opened the messages or responded in the required manner. User data confirms this can reduce message response times from hours to seconds.
EASY TO DEPLOY AND MANAGE
Our mutual building society case study deployed the Callmy service onto end user devices using its MDM. And the integration with its Active Directory means all users are now automatically provisioned onto the service and will also be removed should they leave the company.
NEXT STEPS
Our case study company is now looking to extend use of the Callmy service to help maintain its staff levels during busy times and may also integrate the service with its own fire alarm system, to improve site evacuations and lockdowns. Long term, it sees Callmy Alert becoming the centralised notification service for its entire IT eco system.
