| Unplanned downtime-Power Outage, Acts of God, | | | | not protect failures outside your building. In a well |
| Fire, you can name them small and large but all cost | | | | planned hosted model, with the right network |
| your company revenue. Preparing to recover your | | | | architecture, as describe above, you will by design |
| voice system can be intimidating and costly until hosted | | | | mitigate most single points of failure with NO NEED to |
| IP PBXs. | | | | buy extra hardware. Further, the customer is eliminated |
| Here are some best practices to help your | | | | from the responsibility and the cost to secure their |
| organization meet its Recovery Time Objectives | | | | infrastructure. |
| (RTO) as it applies to your Voice applications. | | | | 4. Ability to Work Remotely. |
| 1. Highly Reliable Telecommunication Carrier | | | | If an event such weather, illness, family issues, or a |
| Infrastructure | | | | regionalized disaster precludes workers from working |
| Most providers will center their presentations around | | | | in their usual offices. Remote Office features allow |
| Disaster Recovery solutions based on what to put on | | | | your employees to work from home comfortably |
| premises for back up and redundancy. This is all in an | | | | while not incurring extra costs to your company. Your |
| effort to eliminate single points of failure. Before | | | | customers will not realize your employees are working |
| mitigating single points of failure at your location it is | | | | from home since they will not change their calling |
| important to assess the resiliency and redundancy of | | | | patterns (dialing and receiving calls from the same |
| your telecommunication provider's network. Is it | | | | numbers as they did prior to the event). Your |
| redundant? Does it have single points of failure? How | | | | managers will also have the ability to monitor what |
| many soft switches do they maintain? Are their | | | | their employees are doing just as if the employee was |
| switches set-up to be geographically diverse? In a | | | | working from the office (call stasus monitoring, call |
| properly architected Hosted IP PBX model that is built | | | | reporting, etc). |
| for redundancy, (multiple switches at many locations | | | | 5. Consider This... Two plausible scenarios with Alteva's |
| with livefailover) you can almost assure 100% inbound | | | | hosted service that will change the impact any disaster |
| call capacity. | | | | has on your business. |
| 2. Where is the Call Control (Inside or Outside your | | | | Scenario 1 |
| building) | | | | Your sales team is the life blood of your company. |
| If the call control is maintained in the building than | | | | The T1 goes down to your building and you are told it |
| imagine the limitations; someone needs to be in the | | | | will take 4 hours to get back up. In a customer premise |
| building, someone needs to call a PBX maintenance | | | | on-site PBX, the customers dialing your phone number |
| person. Next consider wait times and on hold times | | | | will receive a fast busy signal. However with Alteva |
| with the carrier to reroute your calls. Two hours would | | | | this is not the case. With Alteva, your sales team is still |
| be fast during such times. | | | | getting calls because the call control is not in the |
| Lost time means lost revenue and added customer | | | | building. All calls can easily be routed to cell phones |
| frustration. For many who have experienced this | | | | when a direct number or extension is dialed. Your |
| situation in the past, it is not too hard to imagine | | | | customer does recognize an outage and your |
| The ability to maintain call control out of the building and | | | | company does not recognize any revenue loss |
| using a network model as described above can | | | | normally associated with a phone outage. |
| immediately satisfy most of your telecommunications | | | | Scenario 2 |
| continuity needs. But the real value is giving the | | | | Your building experiences a catastrophic fire. You |
| company or the IT department maximum control over | | | | have a lot of work to do to rebuild and get the |
| the telephony infrastructure. With this added control | | | | company back on its feet. Because you have chosen |
| you NEVER miss a call. Allow users to reroute their | | | | Alteva service, during the fire your calls were still being |
| calls to cells phone, home office numbers, and | | | | answered by an auto attendant or voicemail. You |
| recovery sites or wherever you choose and most | | | | decided to have your calls routed to another number |
| importantly whenever you choose. | | | | and it happened instantly. Within two days you had |
| 3. Component Redundancy. | | | | your people working from home. Your voicemails |
| Vendors will stress this point. While it is critical to have | | | | were intact. Of all things you had to deal with, because |
| properly architected on-premise redundancy in regards | | | | you chose well by choosing Alteva, your |
| to telephony, buying twice as much equipment still does | | | | communications were the least of your headaches. |