The industry has published many studies and surveys about how crippling a telecom disaster can be as well as how unprepared most companies really are when it comes to recovering from a phone system outage of any sort. A 2009 study from the Business Research Institute which revealed that of all the recovery points necessary in the event of a disaster (data loss, employee management, notifications, etc.), 65 percent of businesses surveyed said telecommunications was the weakest link.
The planning behind a telecom disaster recovery service should not just take national or natural disasters into account. What about the mundane and non-disasters such as planned downtime? What about simple things like a false fire alarm? There are multiple reasons why a company's employees may not be able to answer their own phones in their own office. Why not be prepared? This is not a hard process, but it is an important one.
If you are going to put a telecom disaster recovery solution in place, ideally it is one that is not physically located in your office. In fact, it should not be located in your city as it may be affected by a natural or national disaster. Ideally, the telecom disaster recovery service would be a hosted service that is located at least 50 miles away from your place of business. By going with a hosted service, you will end up with these benefits:
Hot-standby PBX with Automatic Failover
The hosted phone service waits in the background until it is needed. When called upon, there is no hardware to boot, no software to run, and no data to move. As a hot standby PBX it is ready to go. Failover can be automatic and almost instantaneous, or you can bypass automatic failover and manage the transition on your own. Calls can be routed to alternate phones in any location, such as cellular phones, phones in branch offices, or home phones.
Scale to Any Level
A hosted phone service is so complete, with so many important features, that it can usually directly mirror your primary PBX. Any size company can use the service, and it can provide phone system business continuity for all workers, or just for the most critical business functions.
Employee Emergency Hotline
Even if your business is prepared for an emergency, that's not always true of your employees. An emergency hotline that is ready to provide instructions for how they should handle any given situation is a lot easier to remember than how the system is wired to deliver calls outside in the event of a fire in the building.
Complete Architectural Assistance
While the way in which you want calls handled is up to you, building and maintaining your disaster recovery should not cut into your time. When you create a hosted phone service solution, your provider should be able to help you prepare, configure, and test the service.
Knowledge research firms like Basex, Inc., have estimated that a standard 500-person company would lose over $90,000/day from loss of phone service. Given the amount at stake and the ease of creating and maintaining an automatic fail-over phone service by using a hosted phone service, it is strongly recommended that any company who has not already prepared for disaster start this process right away. Disaster can be right around the corner and take you by surprise. Disaster comes in many shapes and sizes, so be prepared.
