Can you give an example?
Let me give you a true story from this past summer. We get a lot of thunderstorms in Florida and every summer we get a couple power flickers. But not that day.
As I prepared for a 2 p.m. phone call with a good business prospect, there was a brief flickering of the overhead fluorescent lights. I clicked to my Outlook Calendar and it happened again. I noticed my second monitor flash off and on — a reminder that I should plug it into my UPS. I looked out the window to check for the ominous black clouds that warn of the almost-daily afternoon thunderstorms we experience in Florida this time of year. Skies were, however, sunny and blue.
Just as I opened my calendar to find the phone number to call, the lights flickered for the last time. Atop the eight-story building, a massive air conditioner unit seized up, shorting 220 volts of power and sending a surge to the main circuit panel. In the power room, the main breaker fried, causing a shower of sparks to cascade to the floor. The building was eerily quiet, dark and powerless.
Of course my calendar with the phone number I was about to dial was open on my second monitor, the one not connected to my UPS. I was already a minute or so late for the call as I fumbled to move the calendar from my blank monitor to my notebook PC. After several tries, I caught the menu bar with my mouse and was able to see the number. I clicked to dial the number and went into sales mode as if nothing had happened. During my conversation, the power went on and off again and again. When I finished the conversation a half-hour later, the power died for the last time. In fact, it did not come back until the next day.
Situations like this are why preparing for a disaster is so important. You never know what is going to happen, and disaster comes in all shapes and sizes. We had not rehearsed this scenario specifically, but I was glad our communications were in the cloud.
How did cloud-based communications help you with disaster recovery?
In general, cloud-based communications provide customers with the ability to reroute calls, dynamically set up remote office capability and manage their phone systems from a browser. This, combined with power and network redundancy, allows you to continue communicating — even in the event of no power at all.
When our building lost power, the on-site batteries gave us time to move equipment around, tap into local wireless routers and decide which employees should work from home. Since all of our network equipment and servers are located in secure data centers, all our systems continued to operate as if nothing happened. Even when our on-site batteries ran down, our staff was able to work from home where they had access to the network monitoring and ticketing systems to continue business as usual. Our phones were diverted to employees’ mobile phones or home office phones, depending upon how they configured their individual profiles.
Other than getting a little extra exercise from walking down the stairs, it was just another day for our employees. But most importantly, not one of our customers ever noticed that we experienced and survived a disaster.
With cloud-based communications, you can continue with business as usual no matter what occurs. How would your business be affected if your building lost power for the entire day? Would it be business as usual? <<
Mark Swanson is the CEO of Telovations Inc. Reach him at [email protected].