VoIP and Disaster Recovery: Why It’s Essential for Your Business

Article By Stephen McClelland

31/07/2024

Disaster recovery is not just for big businesses. Communications are so vital to businesses of all sizes that even in the rare occasion your business finds itself offline, you need to have a Disaster Recovery plan to reduce the inconvenience to your customers and any potential losses.

Most businesses already have systems to protect their staff – evacuation routes, fire exits, and the like. These are legal requirements for the safety of employees and customers, and they have been around for quite some time.

Recently, disaster recovery and business continuity have become hot topics. But much of the emphasis is on protecting data and the systems surrounding it. What do you do if your Internet connection goes down? How would you cope if it happened during your busiest period of the year? How do you respond if hackers break into your system? As a business, you make sure your people and data are protected. How would you keep the lines of communication open?

Do I Really Need Disaster Recovery for My Phone Systems?

It’s not hard to understand why businesses forget about voice when it comes to disaster recovery. Traditionally, your phone company was in charge of your phones. As long as the lines were functioning, you had service. Once the lines go down, you’re left with nothing. There were relatively few options, such as requesting to forward to an external number, but you couldn’t pick up your phone and take it with you.

However, your phones are a vital part of any disaster recovery plan. Even the simplest emergency response plan requires communication. Whether you have to contact emergency services, police, or the employees within your office, you need connected phones.

You need the phones to respond when disaster strikes and to be prepared if something happens to your phone system itself. Natural or man-made disasters can easily bring down your phone systems, even if they were not the primary target.

Backup Plans for VoIP

If you already have hosted VoIP services, you don’t have to worry too much about disaster recovery. After all, none of the equipment is at your office, practice, or shop. Your provider delivers phone services through the cloud. If something should happen to your office, you can relocate your employees or send them home. They can continue working from anywhere. The majority of good providers will do this automatically, but take some time to check through the details of your provider’s VoIP backup to make sure you are properly protected. Yellowcom is an excellent choice for such needs, offering robust VoIP backup solutions tailored to keep your business running smoothly.

However, if you have your own SIP installation, then you need to create disaster recovery plans. The backup option could be a mirrored PBX system in the cloud or a hybrid deployment. Whatever you decide, you will need another option in the event of a power outage, environmental disaster, etc.

Backup for Internet Connectivity

VoIP phones require the Internet to work. That means any DR plan should account for the loss of Internet. Yellowcom provides solutions for just such an event; either through a SIM slot in the router or an external dongle with a SIM card, that, when a loss of internet is detected, connects to mobile data to maintain your VoIP services.

Do you have a second line to switch over if the primary one fails? What happens if your ISP goes down? Some organizations prefer to have a second line from a different ISP for this exact scenario. You should be able to continue working even if the Internet goes down for an extended period of time.

VoIP Monitoring Systems

One of the crucial elements of disaster recovery is notification. How do you know when to change to your backup and disaster recovery system? VoIP monitoring systems can help with that. There are several monitoring tools available for on-premise SIP deployments. If you purchase cloud services from an external vendor, ask them if they have such tools for your use. Yellowcom’s monitoring systems ensure that even a few minutes of downtime can be minimized, helping you recover faster and keep your business running smoothly.

Automatic Failover

As mentioned previously, good VoIP providers will offer automatic failover protection. That means if calls cannot be completed for any reason, the system will roll over to an alternate solution. If you don’t use hosted services, you might need to create your own failsafe systems.

Do you automatically forward calls to your teams’ mobile devices? Not everyone likes to get business calls on their personal phones. Will you allow your staff to use their personal VoIP services instead? If yes, you will have to reimburse them for business calls. You may have to create plans in conjunction with other policies such as bring-your-own-device (BYOD), identify temporary services, and how your staff will be reimbursed for their resulting expenses, etc.

What DR Plans Does Your Provider Have?

Just because you use cloud VoIP services doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to disaster recovery planning. You should talk to your vendor and see what plans they have to recover from a disaster. After all, you’re depending on their ability to provide phone services to get you through a crisis. Suppose your vendor has 4 data centres. Are they all in the same location or city? Some disasters can strike a large area, so this might actually be a risk.

What happens if one of the data centres loses power? Are calls automatically routed to the others? How quickly can they notify you when something goes wrong? You need the answers to all these questions before a crisis happens. Not all providers know how to manage disaster recovery. Make sure you choose a company like Yellowcom that understands how to manage Disaster Recovery for Small to Medium-sized businesses effectively!