How Hosted PBX Will Save the Day with Disaster Recovery

With customers demanding super-speed transactions and 24/7 support, businesses are under intense pressure to be available to them at all times. But 100% availability isn’t possible in a real world where power outages, natural disasters, severe weather, and cyber-criminals may strike at any moment.

Downtime Is Money

When disasters do occur, your phone lines may be one of the first things to go down – and in many ways this represents the termination of your lifeline, as telecommunications are required not only to enable your customers and suppliers to contact you, but to allow you to link up with news and essential services.

Each minute you’re out of touch translates into lost revenue and lost opportunities: some estimates put it as high as over $90,000 per day for a 500-person enterprise, with other figures suggesting that 80% of organizations that experience a major event go out of business within 18 months of the disaster.

Quick recovery hinges on a swift restoration of normal business operations – and a hosted PBX or VoIP solution can be instrumental in this.

How it Works

A hosted or virtual PBX is a cloud-based service that provides redundancy and fail-over functionality if your on-site PBX or VoIP system goes down. Calls are rerouted dynamically to a backup system, which processes them according to a set of conditions that you specify to your service provider. Disaster Recovery (DR) may be initiated automatically by a pre-configured process, or called up dynamically by a real-time process.

It’s Sometimes Done with Mirrors

Hosted PBX is even available as an option for organizations that operate an on-premises exchange. The cloud service sets up a virtual PBX that mirrors all the functions and features of the on-site hardware. In the event of an outage, the cloud mirror takes over within a few seconds of receiving a set of commands or a message to the service provider, and reroutes all calls through the cloud.

The Benefits

Disaster Recovery via hosted PBX allows for continuity of business communications in the event of network issues (LAN or WAN), natural disasters, equipment failures, power outages, or loss of service from a telecoms carrier. It may also be called upon to provide availability during scheduled downtime and maintenance.

With properly configured processes and triggers, fail-over is almost instantaneous, and monthly subscription plans are as flexible and economic as you would expect from mainstream VoIP services.

It Can Integrate with Data

Being both digital and cloud-based, hosted PBX can integrate with your overall strategies for Disaster Recovery and business continuity, by enhancing the distribution of backup data and software with telecommunications features that allow companies to maintain real-time contact with their employees, suppliers, and clients.