Verizon Business Enhances Business Continuity Portfolio

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Verizon Business has added new capabilities to its business continuity portfolio, increasing the ability of large-business and government customers to maintain operations during unforeseen events such as natural disasters, equipment failures and building evacuations. The new offerings - Verizon Notification Services and Strohl Systems' Planning and Incident Management Software - help organizations develop effective response plans, manage events and quickly communicate with customers, partners and employees.

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, business continuity and disaster recovery efforts have topped corporate priority lists. In fact, the pace of unforeseen events - such as virus attacks, power failures, bio-terrorism, bomb threats and building evacuations - has grown in both frequency and potential cost. The impact of a network outage, hazardous material spill or any type of natural disaster can be measured in lost revenue, lower productivity and loss of brand reputation.

"Customers today have shifted the focus from disaster response to business continuance," said Jim DeMerlis, vice president of managed services, Verizon Business. "The goal is to now minimize any potential for downtime and create a seamless plan to help ensure business activities and communications continue. The Verizon Business portfolio helps customers address the full life cycle of business continuance activities by providing a strong focus on planning and preparedness and offering customers a broad range of services to effectively plan, manage and recover from business-impacting events."

Planning and Incident Management Software
To continue providing best-in-breed business continuity consulting services to its customers, Verizon Business has extended its relationship with Strohl Systems, a leader in business continuity planning software and services.

Verizon Business now will deliver the full suite of Strohl Systems business continuity planning software, including: BIA Professional, a business-impact-analysis survey tool that helps determine vulnerabilities and impacts, and prioritizes planning efforts; LDRPS (Living Disaster Recovery Planning System), a central repository to manage and update complex business continuity plan data; and Incident Manager, powered by WebEOC, an online command center that coordinates and tracks disaster response activities and keeps key personnel informed.

These software products automate business continuity planning activities, from the impact analysis process of identifying and mapping critical processes and interdependencies to development, implementation and life-cycle management of business continuity plans. As a result, complex network architectures and business continuity plans can be integrated to deliver effective, up-to-date and actionable threat-mitigation and response strategies.

Verizon Business Notification Services
Verizon Business has also joined forces with EnvoyWorldWide®, a PAR3 Company and an industry leader in providing fully automated notification services, to help shorten the time it takes to communicate accurate and time-sensitive information to customers, partners and employees.

With Verizon's Notification Services, organizations can now personalize and customize communications while maintaining two-way interactivity via a broad range of wireline and wireless communications including phones, faxes, text messaging and personal digital assistants. Verizon Business' new offering provides a replacement to outdated, cumbersome and time-consuming manual calling trees that were once the norm and offers automatic conference bridging, real-time performance tracking, priority delivery and message receipt tracking.

The new service employs a highly resilient multitier, multiserver architecture with built-in redundancy, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional, premises-based notification systems with single points-of-failure. By delivering timely communications via a hosted notification and message delivery platform, enterprise customers can gain a flexible and cost-efficient method to reach virtually anyone, on most any device.

Comprehensive Business Continuity Portfolio
The Verizon Business portfolio of business continuity services includes comprehensive consulting services - business impact analyses, network assessments, gap analyses, strategy workshops, asset inventory development and vulnerability assessments. The portfolio also includes a virtual file-sharing service, Resilient Network Attached Storage, that centralizes file management, security and business recovery functions, and helps ensure efficient remote access to critical business files.

In addition, Verizon Business offers a wide range of existing communications services that can be critical components of any business continuity plan. These services include resilient voice and data networking, security services, information technology and data center solutions, network-embedded applications, managed network services and satellite services, as well as a variety of collaboration and conferencing, remote access and telecommuting services.

About Verizon Business
Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), is a leading provider of advanced communications and information technology (IT) solutions to large business and government customers worldwide. Combining unsurpassed global network reach with advanced technology and professional service capabilities, Verizon Business delivers innovative and seamless business solutions to customers around the world. For more information, visit www.verizonbusiness.com.

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