You have to remember that it's harder to keep people in a given building than it is to safeguard the equipment there. You always have to be ready to send your NOC operators packing with a cell phone and a laptop for up to 48 hours, in case the building has to be evacuated for one of a dozen reasons. You should have a backup call center with an ACD set up in some other city or a contract with someone for a backup service.

You realize you have just cursed someone's NOC to this fate. If my next post comes from Monterey, California, you'll know we had to evacuate to our backup NOC. Once upon a time, when Merit ran the Internet, as their last best hope they had a plan for the NOC operators to grab a laptop as they ran from the NOC. One of the harder things to plan is how you are going to get back inside your possibly non-functioning, or damaged network from the outside without leaving too many backdoors for the evil ones. Its a embarassing when your SecureID servers crashes inside a building you can't physically enter, and none of your network equipment will let you log in. Its even more embarassing when a cracker uses your 'secret' backdoor and takes over your network. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation