Prepare your business before the unthinkable happens
We have far too many reminders of how devastating natural disasters can be. Just as Haiti and Chile begin recovering from the shattering effects of major earthquakes, U.S. businesses face yet another season of massive flooding in the plains, wildfires in the west and tornadoes all around. Add in the predictions of “a much more active” 2010 hurricane season with “above normal threats on the U.S. coastline” by AccuWeather.com’s Hurricane Center meteorologists, and 2010 could turn out to be a record year for natural disasters.
Certainly those in the U.S. along the south Atlantic and Gulf Coasts have taken business continuity planning more seriously since the days of Katrina, and many large Northeast institutions have done likewise since the horrors of 9/11. But generally speaking, the majority of small–to–medium enterprises (SMEs) have let their business continuity planning languish, especially around their communications infrastructure. And it’s easy to understand why. If a business doesn’t face a potential catastrophe on a regular basis, it’s hard to justify the high cost of preparing for an enterprise–disabling event when the threat of one is minimal.
However, what may be considered a nuisance for a larger company can spell disaster for a SME. If a business is inextricably tied to a brick–and–mortar building, any event that keeps employees from entering the building can spell disaster–whether it’s something as big as a hurricane or as seemingly small as a water main break.
And when a disaster strikes, businesses can’t put a “to be continued…” sign up on their front doors, especially as research shows that the majority of SMEs who experience an interruption lasting 10 days or more never fully recover, and most close within two years. Therefore, employees need to be prepared to continue working productively in the face of any situation.
While most SMEs’ recovery plans include data backup, there is one important aspect of planning that is often overlooked: how employees and customers will continue communicating if a disruption occurs at the company’s premises. For most SMEs, replicating a PBX at a second location and creating a failover procedure is economically unfeasible. Nevertheless, ensuring communications in the event of a disruption is critical to the success of any company, and a robust hosted communications solution can offer unmatched continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
With hosted communications, the technology is located in the cloud, so employees can continue communicating and collaborating from any location that has an Internet connection. Hosted solutions can be implemented easily and with no capital expense on the part of the SME, no need to hire additional IT staff and no worries of technological obsolescence. Hosted unified communication solutions also offer a range of functionality that can replicate the conveniences of being in an office, allowing business to continue operating for any length of time if employees cannot enter the building.
Sure, that sounds like a tall order for a communications solution, but Cypress customer, Berkshire Capital Financial can attest to its validity. When a steam pipe exploded in New York City and Berkshire employees could not enter the building for three weeks, they experienced the full range of business continuity features with Cypress’ hosted unified communications solution, C4 IP®
“We plugged in our laptops and used our soft phones to call customers and return voicemails, and C4 IP worked beautifully,” said Nik Hakimian, Operations Manager at Berkshire Capital Financial. “For the next three weeks we operated this way and secured over $500,000 in revenue. With our old PBX–based system, we would have been in serious trouble.”
Have you ever imagined what would happen if your employees could not enter your building for even just one day? How would you communicate with them? More importantly, how would they communicate with customers? And how would that affect your revenue? Your customer satisfaction?
With Cypress’ C4 IP and C3 IP hosted solutions, companies can operate “virtually” with employees scattered away from corporate offices, yet operating as if they were sitting side–by–side. To the outside world, the geographic distribution of the employees is transparent.
Employees can communicate from any location that has an Internet connection—by making and receiving calls using the soft phones on their laptops; by using the instant messaging feature; or by holding conferences from remote locations using audio, web or video conferencing. Additional unified communications features make it even easier to continue business-as-usual: real-time presence shows when colleagues are available, on the phone, or logged out; unified messaging enables users to access voicemails via email; and advanced call routing makes it easy for users to redirect calls to another phone based on time, day and caller. With the routing feature, users can even ring multiple devices simultaneously or sequentially, and they can adjust settings with the convenient communications portal using any Internet connection.
Beyond the great flexibility the hosted delivery model provides, it also enables SMEs to not just survive, but to continue thriving in the face of significant disaster, with little or no down time. Now that’s a very real competitive edge, and in today’s economic times, a necessity.
