Disaster Recovery

An Insurance Policy for Your Voice/Data System

Today, a business phone system is not only a tool for voice calls. A modern, IP-based business phone system is also an insurance policy. Insurance policy? Sure; an IP-based business phone system helps a company be prepared to recover from a disaster that in the past might have been truly disastrous for business.

A key element of disaster recovery for a phone system is redundancy. That is, the business phone system needs to have duplicate functionality at multiple locations. This way, if the business phone system at a company’s headquarters or main call center goes down, calls are routed to another location and business doesn’t stop.

Today, a modern, IP-PBX based, distributed business phone system includes built-in redundancy. That’s because a distributed, IP-based business phone system works as a single system across all geographies. If business phone system equipment at one location goes down, calls are seamlessly re-routed to another location. This redundancy feature of a modern business phone system is unseen by the customer.

In the past, creating a business phone system with disaster recovery-grade redundancy required installing multiple PBXs, voice mail systems, automated attendants and automatic call distribution systems at each location. With an IP-based business phone system, that’s no longer required. Instead, the business phone system is distributed, with no single point of failure, using intelligent gateways that run on standard server hardware from anywhere on the IP network.