Consider IP Telephony from a Disaster Recovery point of view
Submitted by: Guy Yasika, Sr. Account Manager, Alteva
Unplanned downtime — Power Outage, Acts of God, Fire, you can name them small and large but all cost your company revenue. Preparing to recover your voice system can be intimidating and costly until hosted IP PBXs.
Here are some best practices to help your organization meet its Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) as it applies to your Voice applications.
Highly Reliable Telecommunication Carrier Infrastructure
Most providers will center their presentations around Disaster Recovery solutions based on what to put on premises for back up and redundancy. This is all in an effort to eliminate single points of failure. Before mitigating single points of failure at your location it is important to assess the resiliency and redundancy of your telecommunication provider’s network. Is it redundant? Does it have single points of failure? How many soft switches do they maintain? Are their switches set-up to be geographically diverse? In a properly architected Hosted IP PBX model that is built for redundancy, (multiple switches at many locations with live failover) you can almost assure 100% inbound call capacity.
Where is the Call Control (Inside or Outside your building)
If the call control is maintained in the building than imagine the limitations. Someone needs to be in the building, someone needs to call a PBX maintenance person, then the typical two hour call to the local carrier, and then wait until the numbers are re-routed to your desired hot-site.
Lost time means lost revenue and added customer frustration. For many for have experienced this situation in the past it is not too hard to imagine.
The ability to maintaining call control out of the building and using a network model as described above can immediately satisfy most of the telecommunications continuity needs. But the real value is giving the company or the IT department maximum control over the telephony infrastructure. With this added control you NEVER miss a call. Allow users to reroute their calls to cells phone, home office numbers, and recovery sites or wherever you choose and most importantly whenever you choose.
Component Redundancy
Vendors will stress this point. While it is critical to have properly architected on-premise redundancy but in regards to telephony, buying twice as much equipment still does not protect failures outside your building. In a well planned hosted model, with the right network architecture, as describe above, will by design mitigated most single points of failure with NO NEED to buy extra hardware eliminating the customer from the responsibility and the cost to secure their infrastructure.
Ability to Work Remotely
If an event precludes workers from working in their usual offices such weather, illness, family issues, or a regionalized disaster. Remote office features allow your employees to work from home comfortably while not incurring extra costs to your company. Your customers will not realize your employees are working from home since they will not change their calling patterns (dialing and receiving calls from the same numbers as they did prior to the disaster). Your managers will also have the ability to monitor what their employees are doing just as if the employee was working from the office (call stasis monitoring, call reporting, etc).
Consider This... Two plausible scenarios with a hosted service like Alteva’s that will change the impact any disaster has on your business.
Your sales team is the life blood of your company. The T1 goes down to your building and you are told it will take 4 hours to get back up. In a customer premise on-site PBX, the customers dialing your phone number will receive a fast busy signal. However with Alteva this is not the case. With Alteva, your sales team is still getting calls because the call control is not in the building. All calls are being answered by the auto attendant then as your customers enter in their extension they are routed to a cell phone that is simultaneously rung with your staff office phone. Your customer does recognize an outage and your company does not recognize any revenue loss normally associated with a phone outage.
You have a fire in the building and it is a catastrophic fire. You have a lot of work to do to rebuild and get the company back on its feet. Because you have chosen Alteva service, during the fire your calls were still being answered by an auto attendant. You decided to have your calls routed to another number and it happened instantly. Within two days you had your people working from home. Your voicemails were intact, your people were sent new phones and they just plugged into their high speed home connections. Of all things you had to deal with, because you choose well by choosing Alteva, the phones were the least of your headaches.
About the Author
Guy Yasika has been working in VoIP since 1999, He is a seasoned sales person that can explain the virtues of VoIP. He is currently working as a Sr Account Manager for Alteva and can be reached by email for comment gyasika@altevatel.com.
About Alteva
Alteva has been in VoIP since 2000 Launching their network in 2003. The Alteva Network is fully redundant, and location redundant. The website www.altevatel.com Copyrighted all rights reserved.
I.T. is the new IT
Having been involved in the information technology business for over twenty years, I’ve seen many business cycles and technology waves. In a 2003 HBR article titled IT Doesn’t Matter, the author compares IT to other supposedly similar technologies like railroads and electric power’. The author concludes that the commoditization of IT will render it impotent as a competitive advantage. Really? I was amazed by the article when it came out. Comparing the dynamic, ever changing information technology landscape to the static still pretty much exactly as it was when first introduced’ technologies of railroads and electric power seemed rather short sighted. If it were true, we’d still be using abaci not ERPS systems to do our accounting! The flaw in the author’s analysis was to ignore the realities of information technology as not just a business facilitator, but rather as a business enabler. And therein lays the key to leveraging IT as a tool for creating competitive advantage: By giving IT forethought and building new business ideas and processes that take information technology into account at the onset, and not merely as an automation tool.
Businesses that understand how to integrate information technology into the fabric of the organization will gain a significant strategic advantage. The challenge is to know and understand that unlike railroads and electricity, the nature and capability of information technology is constantly changing. Therefore, it is the agile business capable of adapting and responding to ever changing business cycles and technology waves that is going to maintain and press that strategic advantage.
The author’s assertion holds true when businesses treat IT as a cost of doing business, a mere facilitator rather than an indispensable enabler. Neudesic’s experience across thousands of projects with hundreds of customers leads us to believe that many businesses are in fact getting IT. More and more, we’re being engaged to help design and implement a comprehensive "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) strategy. SOA is a key enabler in bridging the gap between what businesses need and what information technology can deliver. This goes to the core of improving system performance and business relevance. This improved alignment is already unlocking productivity within businesses, helping to reshape the economy as complete supply chains become more effectively integrated. We’re also witnessing a significant rise in how businesses view user/system interaction. Increasingly, the "user experience" is taking center stage in helping our customers deliver enhanced productivity and agility. By creating seamless integration across enterprise services and delivering effective and timely information to users in a highly collaborative and information rich environment, many of our clients have gained an undeniable strategic advantage over their competition. More than ever, I.T. DOES matter!
Information technology is the IT that connects customers with businesses. Information technology in conjunction with business strategy is the differentiator between success and failure. At Neudesic, we couldn’t be more excited about that!
Neudesic is a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold Certified Partner with a proven track record of providing reliable, effective solutions based on Microsoft’s technology platform. Neudesic’s technical and industry expertise empowers enterprises to enhance their technological capacity and respond to business opportunities with a greater level of efficiency. Neudesic was established in 2001 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. Neudesic offers its products and services nationwide with offices located in Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego and Seattle, and a global presence based out of India.
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