3.1 Identify telecom services

Create a list of all telecommunication services that are used by the case organisation. This list must be exhaustive. If a service is accidentally omitted, no risk assessment will be performed on it, and dependencies between the service and other services will not be discovered. As a result, decision makers may take unnecessary or ineffective countermeasures, or overlook necessary countermeasures.

To create the list of telecom services, the following information sources may be useful:

Briefly describe each telecom service. At this stage it is not yet necessary to describe the technical implementation, but if information is available on such items as handsets, terminals, or links, then this should be included in the descriptions.

If a telecom service acts as backup to some other telecom service, or when the service itself has fallback options, then these must be described as well.

The descriptions must also include the relevance of the telecom service to the operations of the organisation. That is, is the service essential, or merely a 'nice to have'?

It will also be useful at this stage to start a glossary of abbreviations and definitions of special terms that may not be clear to all analysts, or to the sponsor.