Building a Call Center in Two Days: How a World Class Support Center Responds to Crisis

摘要

In the Fall of 2011, VCU was faced with a crisis. During routine monitoring of servers at the VCU Computing Center, suspicious activity was found on one of the servers. The server was taken offline and an investigation was put into motion, which determined that a hacker had access to the server for a period of 56 minutes. This server stored 10 files that contained information on 176,567 individuals, including VCU students, employees, and VCU Health System employees. Data items included social security numbers and either individual names or elD usernames; and, in some cases, date of birth, contact information and various programmatic or departmental information. The investigation indicated a low likelihood of the data actually being compromised. The university began preparing for a response to this incident. Letters were both emailed and sent via the US Postal Service to all 176,567 individuals. What was needed to support this mass mailing was a call center to respond to the incident. The VCU helplT Center was contacted by VCU TS Administrators to create such a call center on Tuesday, November 8 at 4:55pm. The issue at hand was that the call center had to be online and operational by Friday, November 11th at 7:30am. This presentation will discuss what was done to create such a call center in such a short time frame, the lessons learned along the way, and how VCU turned this experience into an ongoing Emergency Communications Plan.