Disaster Recovery

Environmental Issues

Where the IP PBX is housed at the business customer’s site, in the event of a serious environmental issue such as fire, flood, vandalism following break in or power outage, callers will receive a busy tone. The voice mail facility will also be incapacitated. Some of these problems will persist for days and are impossible to overcome in the short term. This represents a major business continuity problem and will undoubtedly lead to loss of business and credibility.

With a hosted solution in ANY of the above scenarios, all critical elements are located physically on the service provider’s network on multiple sites. This means that important auto attendant and voice mail functions can be accessed from any remote location. If a business customer suffers a serious environmental issue, phones can be plugged into the IP network from any remote location and business carries on as normal.

Hardware Failure

When the IP PBX fails because of a hardware issue, the business customer is required to call their support company. At best this will be same day 4 hour fix assuming it is a simple repair and spares are made available. Often the repair will be next day and in the case of older systems, spares are often on back order. This can represent a major business continuity problem and will undoubtedly lead to loss of business and credibility. Hosted solution providers also suffer from hardware failures. However because all systems are replicated on different sites and mirrored this will not cause a problem for the business customer. There will be no business continuity issues or loss of business or credibility.

Hacking

A business’s IP PBX is connected to the onsite LAN. As a result if the LAN becomes infected with a virus, then the PBX is also susceptible to hacking from the outside world. This malicious type of attack will lead to a serious service interruption and possible hardware failure.

A hosted solution on the other hand is managed through a secure network with built in redundancy and high levels of security. This removes the risk of a hacker attack.

Line Failure

Where there is a failure by the service provider of fixed lines such as BT or Cable & Wireless there is no immediate fix. There will be no service until the line failure is fixed and this can take days in some instances depending on the nature of the problem.

In the unlikely event of a DSL failure, the hosted solution is simply pointed at the spare existing data line in the customer’s office and service can be resumed in a few minutes until the primary DSL line is fixed.