"After a phone tunnel fire affecting 130,000 businesses including Yell,
ICM's efforts helped us to be up and running quickly with minimal disruption"
YELL
Exclusion Zones
Syndication normally has an associated exclusion zone. This is the distance around the client site, within which the recovery supplier will not resell the client's resources to another potential customer.
ICM will typically not sell the same syndicated service to anyone within 250 metres of an existing subscriber. This means that we will not sell a new client the same seat as an existing subscriber. It is possible for several clients within 250m of each other, to contract to the same centre or service, but they will not be sold the same seats, as the facilities will be sufficiently large to accommodate multiple invocations, for example in different recovery suites.
This is an important concept when producing risk declarations. ICM clients may negotiate wider exclusion zones based on their own assessment of shared service risk.
Multiple Invocations and Contention
Outside the agreed exclusion zones there is the possibility that clients may compete for syndicated services in the event of multiple invocations.
ICM looks not only at how many other clients are within the exclusion zone - which could be a sizeable number, particularly in city centres – but also at how many seats each client is contracted to.
ICM believes that the real issue is competition. As a simple example, if five clients were all within 250m but everyone had 50 seats, then a 250 seat centre would be large enough in overall capacity. However, if six clients within 250m of each other all have 50 seats each and all invoke simultaneously, then you have contention.
ICM's risk management systems act to avoid any such contention up to 250m. Above this distance contention is monitored, however it may still occur in such a large geographical area; an exclusion zone radius of 1km encompasses an area of over 3 square kilometres.
ICM believes contention is a more effective measure of syndication risk than client site count alone.
Ordnance Survey Grid
With bands of 250m, being extremely accurate on the locations of client sites and recovery centres is critical. ICM discovered that postcodes were not accurate enough to determine the necessary exclusion zones and contention figures, so an Ordnance Survey grid system was adopted. An internet link on the VSRD takes the client to an online map which accurately pinpoints any relevant client risk sites.