In previous blogs we covered the importance of telecom disaster recovery and what to look for in a telecom disaster recovery service provider. 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. Like the 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.
VirtualPBX has made the process very simple with our telecom disaster recovery service PBX Parachute. Here’s what you get:
Hot-standby PBX with Automatic Failover
PBX Parachute 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
PBX Parachute 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 PBX Parachute account, you just let us know how the calls need to get handled and we carry it from there. Need to update your plans or messages? Just send us an email, we’ll get any recordings or routing taken care of for you.
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. Says Cheryl Arscott of Reservation Services International, “Had I not completed and signed up for the VirtualPBX Parachute program we would have been out of business for 10 days. With the PBX Parachute, our company was able to stay in contact with our customers by phone when our normal phone system was down during hurricane Wilma”.
Given the amount at stake and the ease of creating and maintaining an automatic fail-over phone service through VirtualPBX’s PBX Parachute service, we strongly urge any company who has not already prepared for disaster to give us a call. 1-888-825-0800, option 1, and you can acquire phone system readiness for whatever storms may come your way. As we say here at VirtualPBX — don’t get caught with your phones down!
