Sales Director
A diverse group of smiling customer service representatives wearing headsets working in a call center.When unexpected challenges occur, it’s important for your business to have a plan. A robust process that means you can continue providing your service despite disruptions. For companies using VoIP for their communication, it can play a significant part in supporting your disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
In this article, we’ll explore how your VoIP system can help keep your business afloat during potential challenges and disruptions.
If you’d like to learn more about VoIP technology, what it is, and how it works - our article ‘What is VoIP?’ has everything you need to know.
Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are essential strategies that help organisations cope with, recover from, and maintain service during events like natural disasters and major power outages.
BC strategies ensure that, should a disaster occur, you have processes in place to continue providing a service. These plans may involve:
DR strategies centre around restoring systems and essential data after a disaster. Some key areas of DR planning include:
Combined, they work to:
VoIP allows your business to stay connected to colleagues and customers, even during most disruptions. Let’s dive into some of the areas your VoIP system can support you in during a disaster scenario.
Unlike traditional phone systems that rely on underground copper wiring to send data, VoIP operates over the Internet. This means your communication system isn’t tied to one location, allowing consistent communication across teams, even if they can’t access a central office.
VoIP internet connectivity means that as long as your staff have access to a broadband connection, they can still use your systems regardless of location. This is ideal for remote staff, who can use their mobiles, laptops, or any internet-enabled device to stay connected, whether at home or on the move.
In the event of a disaster, you may need to adjust your system capacity. It may be that some of your workforce can’t access systems or due to increased customer call volume after significant downtime.
Luckily, VoIP allows businesses to scale their systems up and down; so whether it’s adding or removing users, or installing additional backup, you’ll be able to do it quickly and easily within your central VoIP interface.
An incredible 50% of business downtime is due to network outages. To combat issues like this, most VoIP providers have multiple data centres, located in different areas of a country or region.
This series of backups ensures that if one data centre is affected by a disaster, another can take over. Their VoIP service can then run uninterrupted, allowing businesses like yours to stay active even when local infrastructure fails.
Maintaining landline connections can be expensive due to high setup fees, ongoing maintenance costs, and significant long-distance charges. In contrast, VoIP uses the internet to provide free or low-cost calls, making it ideal for businesses with remote teams or multiple office locations.
VoIP systems often feature scalable pricing models, which means you’ll only pay for the features and services your business needs. This flexibility can be crucial during disaster recovery scenarios when budgets are tight.
You’ll also save on bulky additional hardware. Since VoIP operates on existing internet connections, you’ll avoid the costs of purchasing and maintaining dedicated phone equipment. This also simplifies moving or expanding office locations, as you can quickly set up most of your systems without a need for extensive technical support.
For VoIP users, it’s important to manage their system proactively. Real-time monitoring lets you track various call metrics such as call quality, latency, and jitter. Your IT team (or provider for cloud-based VoIP) can then proactively manage and optimise your system, ensuring high-quality communication, while also isolating potential vulnerabilities before they escalate.
These metrics also help detect usage patterns, understand peak usage times, and allow you to allocate system resources and staff where they’re needed the most. They’re especially useful during disaster recovery scenarios when communication demands may unexpectedly rise. By having a clear view of how your service is being used, you can adjust your system accordingly.
VoIP systems like T2K’s 3CX model come with a host of built-in features to make your phone operations more efficient. For example, call forwarding lets your team redirect calls to different devices, ensuring important calls aren’t missed during disruptions. This keeps communication with clients, customers, and team members consistent.
Another great feature is voicemail-to-email transcription, which turns voicemails into text and sends them to your email. So, even if your phone systems go down, you’ll still get important messages and can support your customers.
To learn more about common features included in many VoIP services, be sure to read our article ‘50+ VoIP Features You Should Look for When Choosing a Business Phone System’.
Understanding how your VoIP system can support you during a disaster is essential. Equally important, though, is ensuring it has the capability to do so. By performing regular resilience and capability checks on your VoIP system, you’ll avoid scrambling for a solution when the unexpected happens.
Remember to create regular backups of your VoIP settings and configurations. That way, even if your entire system fails, you can quickly restore it to its previous state with minimal downtime. It's also a good idea to test these backups to confirm they function correctly and are reliable enough to support your business in an emergency.
With 45% of businesses stating that downtime was caused by hardware failure, it’s worth having an alternative option should your primary system go down. Solutions like redundant network paths allow you to keep call traffic flowing during system disruptions. At the same time, failover mechanisms can detect system failures and automatically switch to a backup system, allowing your business to remain active.
Power outages are unpredictable and can significantly impact VoIP systems. To reduce potential damage, consider investing in a backup power supply like an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). These battery backups are useful if your systems need time to shut down properly or when switching to another power source without losing important data.
By maintaining and updating your VoIP system, you’ll reduce the risk of experiencing significant downtime when disaster strikes. And with a worrying 41% of companies failing to test their disaster recovery systems regularly, it’s worth bearing in mind just how critical these checks are.
System updates not only keep your business safe from new online threats, but also provide performance improvement updates to help it run better. Regular maintenance, including real-time monitoring, lets you spot and fix potential issues. This way, your VoIP system can continue supporting your business until challenges are averted.
VoIP isn't just great for communication—it's also incredibly useful when unexpected problems occur. It supports you in maintaining reliable business communication, while both securing your data and being flexible to your fluctuating needs.
Remember that your VoIP system needs support, too. By performing regular maintenance and backing up your system, you’ll have a VoIP service capable of supporting your business in the most challenging situations.
To learn more about how VoIP can help your business during disasters, contact T2K today.
Having worked for T2k for nearly 25 years, it's fair to say that Lee is an expert when it comes to all things telephony and business communications. Overseeing the commercial side of the business, he has helped the company evolve and grow through the decades. In recent years, and with the advent of VoIP and hosted telephony, Lee has made sure that T2k is at the forefront of technological developments. With a firm interest in helping businesses navigate the world of telecoms, Lee is responsible for the majority of the content on this website.
