Welcome to Switched On!
What would you do if your business became a victim of disaster? There was a fire in your building, a flood, earthquake, a major power outage, denial of service attack or simply, your voice and data network just fails. Would you still be able to serve your customers?
Despite its importance, many organisations don’t have disaster recovery on their radar. A 2005 IDC survey found that while 80 percent of organisations across Asia-Pacific had secured their infrastructure, only 36 percent of respondents had deployed disaster recovery solutions.
An IDC Continuum Report in 2004 researched the disaster recovery and business continuity plans for 131 companies in Australia and New Zealand. It found that 19 percent of organisations in Australia had no disaster recovery plan in place. Around 44 percent had one measure in place for disaster recovery and 18 percent had three or four in place.
That one measure that these companies have in place is most likely to be a simple data backup plan. However, there are other things that need to be considered such a having offsite storage. Your backups will be of no use to you if they’re in the building with your servers when it burns down!
It is also important to ensure that you have continuity of voice and data services, with access to a standby site and/or the ability for your staff to work from home should disaster strike.
Many companies are now taking advantage of the cost savings and productivity enhancement offered by Voice-over-IP technology. However, most don’t realise that VoIP phone systems can also enable a level of fault tolerance that was not previously achievable with traditional phone systems.
Normally, if you have an ISDN line coming into your office and it fails, you will be without phones until it is fixed. Whereas with VoIP, as everything is being carried over IP, you can build fault tolerance in at the network level.
For example, if you were to connect to your service provider via Ethernet with SHDSL as a backup service and your Ethernet service fails, you still have connectivity via the SHDSL service allowing you to make and receive calls as per usual.
And by enabling quality of service (QoS), such a solution can provide network continuity in the event of an outage for both voice and data traffic.
If you want to learn more about the disaster recovery options available to you, contact your Telarus Account Executive or Solutions Engineer.Jules Rumsey
Managing director
Telarus