Anywhere365^® Business Continuity Management 101

In our previous blog post on Business Continuity we flagged that unlikely high-impact events are often overlooked in contingency plans. All the more reason to have a more in depth look into how you can master disaster recovery plans. The first part of this diptych started off with how you can influence business continuity yourself. We’ll kick this second post off with some of the measures in our own Anywhere365^® Business Continuity Management (BCM) program.

Always Keep Services Accessible

Regular capacity planning is a part of our Anywhere365^® Business Continuity Management program. Service teams maintain their own raw data for capacity planning. Quarterly scheduled reviews use a model of the system’s current capacity and test it against projected needs in emergency situations.

Our redundant cloud architecture and internal processes aim to always keep services accessible. Azure Monitoring rapidly detects any affected services. Is your tenant affected? We’ll notify you through a variety of channels, while our engineers triage the issue. We will restore normal operation ASAP. Post incident reviews are part of the continuous service improvement cycle, to prevent the root cause from impacting other services and customers.

Resilience And Recovery Validation

We regularly audit our Dialogue Cloud, both with internal and external auditors. Dialogue Cloud heavily relies on Microsoft Azure regulations and certifications. Extra measures come from our business continuity and recovery plans. These are annually tested, reviewed and updated. If availability should be threatened, our Business Continuity Team steadily manages full cloud business continuity and recovery activities, leveraging hardware, network, and Microsoft Azure data center redundancy. Data replication between data centers provides high availability and reliability in the case of an incident.

To validate these resilience and recovery strategies against a wide range of potential incidents we have defined multiple categories of test scenarios affecting people, locations, and technology. The validation measures the plan’s effectiveness and the service teams’ readiness to execute. The required validation level for each service is based on its criticality. Customers receive capability validation reports every quarter for select Dialogue Cloud services.

Transparent Communication Is Critical

As a trusted partner, Anywhere365^® builds highly resilient services and follows structured procedures to resolve service incidents. In the case of a service incident, timely, targeted, and highly available communications are critical.

Timely

Anywhere365^® notifies Dialogue Cloud administrators by updating the tenant-specific Service Health Dashboard (SHD) in the Anywhere365^® Admin Portal. Service incident updates are normally provided on an hourly cadence.

Targeted

When monitoring systems detect an issue, we can identify the affected customer base. Even up to region or beyond. We will immediately notify those impacted customers. Reducing unnecessary dialogues is our core business. Rest assured that we will not send you noise notifications that don’t impact you. If the scope of impact is unclear, we expand our communications out to the widest group of customers who are potentially impacted.

Highly Available

Anywhere365^® maintains and is developing multiple channels for service status communications.

• Ancillary communications are available in our Golive! portal
• The Service Health Dashboard (SHD) in the Admin Center
• For major incidents, we publish Post Incident Reviews (PIR) to the SHD
• The mobile Admin App for tenant administrators

Automate Internal Information Distribution

Good to know, the Anywhere365^® Dialogue Cloud API enables you to access real-time service health data. But it also lets you distribute information internally, by yourself. We encourage you to manage helpdesk traffic. We can even let you automate this distribution via AI voice bots and chat bots or other IVR use cases through our no code Dialogue Studio platform.