As a business owner I know my phone system is the lifeblood of my organisation. So I understand that the thought of your phone system going down can keep you up at night.
I am seeing more and more stories of organisations building comprehensive disaster recovery plans because they feel climate disasters are a real threat to their businesses. Fog Creek, a US based software company, has introduced five days of “Climate Leave” a year for its employees as it sees flooding, hurricanes and other natural disasters as a real risk to its organisation as well as its employee’s safety.
Any business that has experienced disaster, like a hurricane, flood or fire, knows first hand that it is not just the physical damage to their premises and infrastructure, but getting the basics back up and running, like your phone system, that can cause the biggest headache.
As many businesses still rely on physical phone lines and on-premise solutions, it can take time to get their phone system back online, especially if you have to spend hours on-hold to your telecommunications provider.
Does size and complexity of your phone system matter?
You would assume that the bigger and more complex the solution the longer it takes to fix your phone system, but that is not the case. Take one of our clients, Oracle CMS, as an example. When a fire burned its office to the ground we had its phone system backup in less than two hours. Oracle CMS has over 450 clients and 500 lines into its business, so it wasn’t a small or basic solution we needed to fix.
The Fix
With a cloud solution already in place we were able to quickly activate its disaster recovery plan. First thing we did was diverted incoming calls to other sites, which provided minimal downtime for its phone system. From there we forwarded the incoming calls to Oracle CMS staff members mobile phones, so its customers continued to receive a consistent service.
Be prepared
There is no way to prevent disasters from occurring but having a disaster recovery plan in place is a good start.
Finally, and most importantly, having a good relationship with your service provider and service level agreement in place is essential to getting your phone service backup and running as quickly as possible if disaster does strike.