Crosstalk with Select Telecom (Spring 2012)
If quality service is important to your company, it’s absolutely imperative for your office to have a Disaster Recovery (DR) Plan. As a company that’s dedicated to customer service, Select Telecom has taken steps to ensure that our customers will be able to reach us 24/7/365, and we know that many of our customers feel the same about their own clients. That’s why when we meet with our customers, one of the first questions we ask is, “What is your DR Plan for your office?” Sometimes a client has a detailed plan in place and is very excited to tell us all about it. But more commonly, we’re met with that deer-in-headlights look: “What Disaster Recovery Plan?”
A Disaster Recovery Plan provides your company with continuity in the face of equipment and service failures caused by emergencies and other factors outside of your control. Think about everything that could go wrong to interrupt your communication. What happens to your calls if your carrier or last mile provider has a problem? And what about your internet bandwidth? If your internet provider’s service is interrupted, how do you retrieve your email or access files stored on a cloud computing server? Any number of natural disasters or even routine service provider maintenance can disrupt your voice and data service for hours or even days at a time. How much lost business are you racking up in the meantime?
A Disaster Recovery Plan helps you to prepare for these eventualities so that no matter what life throws at you, you’re armed with a reliable and efficient contingency plan. If your phone carrier goes out, you can automatically roll your calls to backup lines, to another office location, or even to your cell phone. If your internet goes down, you can switch to failover bandwidth. If your on-site data servers malfunction, make sure that your data has been recently backed up to an alternate location so that you always have access to everything you need to conduct business.
There are many ways to configure a DR Plan and each company has its own unique needs. A business with only one office, for example, will have a very different Disaster Recovery Plan compared to a business with multiple offices. Some companies prefer to allow employees to work from home in an emergency situation, whereas others need a crisis command center with phones and computers at an alternate site.
For many years, Select Telecom has offered up our own space to customers who need an emergency command center. One customer setup their backup servers in our office and has transferred their data to the servers on a regular basis using a VPN connection. In the event that this customer’s equipment went down or they couldn’t get access to their building, they could come to our office and have their full data network running here, along with phones and computers for all of their core employees.
In other cases, companies with a call center or customer service group that handles many calls a day will use a backup office site. When a big snow storm blew in last year and knocked out power in one of our customer’s main offices, employees were able to use their backup site instead. Their phone lines and internet service seamlessly switched over to the backup location, and they were able to provide continuous customer service despite the problems with the weather.
There are infinite ways to design a DR Plan, and the consultants at Select Telecom can help you decide which are the right options for your company. If your office doesn’t have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place, reach out to Select Telecom to be proactive in setting one up as soon as possible, before disaster strikes. The next time an emergency situation arises, the peace of mind from your DR Plan will prove that your planning was well worth the effort.