November 17, 2021 // Product
As part of your Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) plan, non-traditional carriers, like Voxology, empower you to stay connected to your customers and staff when disaster strikes. And, unfortunately, no matter how well prepared you are, disaster will strike. Whether it’s a natural disaster, human error or sabotage, power outages, or a simple hardware failure, the ability to remain up and running during a disaster is one of the preeminent goals of every well-run organization.
In this blog, we’ll quickly cover some best practices for DR before detailing the benefits of Voxology’s CPaaS, including our flexible approach to communications and how it benefits your overall DR and BC plan.
In contrast to traditional carriers that can take hours if not days to reconfigure or recover, Voxology’s DR features provide near instantaneous options to reroute or failover to available, pre-defined alternatives when disaster strikes.
The golden rule of a robust DR plan? Redundancy at every layer of business operations.
By having multiple providers at every level of service (power, IP, telephone service, etc.) you drastically reduce dependencies on any one provider and increase the likelihood of remaining in operation at all times.
You can begin by identifying the major scenarios that could amount to a loss of use of each one of your facilities, for both a short and long period of time. Depending on the geographic disbursement of your sites, assume that at least one site goes down, or perhaps all but one go down.
Then, you can assess both the impact and likelihood of each scenario and determine which scenario(s) you want to prioritize and plan around. Pre-pandemic, many companies assumed that even in the very worst-case scenario at least one of their sites would remain open. This seemingly reasonable assumption left many companies scrambling to figure out where and how their calls would be received when quite literally every office was closed, despite the geographical disbursement.
The financial costs of your telecommunications systems going down may not seem too damaging in the short term. If your phone lines are down, either your SLA is being triggered (in a term agreement) or you aren’t paying for usage (in a usage-based agreement). However, the potential lost deals, the inability to connect to customers during an emergency, and the wasted human interactions once your telecommunications is back up and running can be devastating to your business in the long run. Rather than your sales people focusing on winning new deals, they are forced to spend valuable time apologizing to current customers for being down and making (likely inaccurate) promises that it will never happen again. Hopefully those promises aren’t empty.
Every business must implement DR and BC plans that are best suited for their unique needs, which is why we give our customers multiple options, specifically for inbound telecommunications, which has historically been a challenging scenario around which to plan.
Auto-failover // You can predetermine where Voxology will reroute calls when your primary site(s) go down.
SIP Forward or PSTN Transfer // When one of your locations goes down, you can automatically transfer calls to another inbound trunk, i.e. another SIP destination with different instructions, or we can simply forward your calls to another backup phone number.
DR IVR // Leveraging our Programmable Voice service, you can create a unique IVR that is initiated when you are down. For example, you could play a specific message and set up a virtual voicemail box to capture messages from your customers. After the message has been played and/or voicemail recording has been left, the phone number and the details of the call can be forwarded to the correct email inbox.
Simultaneous Call Limit // In case of a partial outage, you could also cap simultaneous inbound calls, and play a busy signal to all calls over the limit. This allows you to address as many calls as you can, without overloading your impared infrastructure.
As a vital part of your overall Disaster Recovery Plan, our flexible approach to DR limits your exposure to catastrophic telecommunication loss and allows your business to remain up and running while minimizing disruption. Partnering with a cutting-edge CPaaS provider like Voxology gives you invaluable DR tools while enabling you to build and customize your telecommunications infrastructure in a way that best suits your unique needs.
Is your telecom infrastructure ready for the next disaster?