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How
Businesses Can Prepare for Hurricane Phone Outages - Hurricane
Preparation for Business
(ARA)
- Experts are predicting another bad hurricane season this year, with
an above average number of severe storms and hurricanes. During storm
season, disruption of business is almost inevitable, including the
loss of phone service. When phones go down, business stops.
“Few businesses make the necessary preparations for the complete and
total loss of telephone service,” says Jonathan Spira, chief analyst
at Basex, a New York-based research and consulting firm and author of
“Managing the Knowledge Workforce.” “In today’s global economy, where
customers come from all over the world, the ability to maintain
business communications even in hurricane-ravaged areas is essential.
Having a telecommunications backup solution in place is the most
important step a company can take for business continuity.”
In the case of one Florida business, the company narrowly escaped
disaster in October 2005 when Hurricane Wilma made landfall.
“Our phone system is the lifeblood of our business,” said Cheryl
Arscott, president of Reservation Services International (RSI), based
in Fort Lauderdale. The company provides booking services for scuba
diving companies throughout the Caribbean. “Our emergency plan
included implementing a hurricane-proof phone system. When Wilma hit
and we lost power, our primary phone system failed. Luckily, we had
completed installation of a remote backup phone system just one day
before the hurricane struck.”
Although RSI’s power was out for ten days, the company continued to
communicate with its customers thanks to a low-cost remote backup
phone service provided by Virtual PBX, Inc. of San Jose, Calif.
Virtual PBX offers a “hosted” phone service, meaning that the
telephone equipment is housed remotely, outside the area of the
natural disaster.
When telephone calls came in for RSI, the Virtual PBX Service
automatically routed the calls to alternate phone lines for RSI
employees, such as to cell phones, home phones and temporary offices.
Employees could even take calls from shelters or the homes of
relatives where they waited for things to get back to normal.
Paul Hammond, CEO of Virtual PBX, has seen his fair share of
businesses harmed by hurricanes, tornados and other natural disasters.
Hammond offers the following advice to businesses looking to protect
their phone systems against natural disaster:
Telecommunications Disaster Preparedness Tips for Business Owners:
1. Determine if your phone system is disaster-proof. If your phone
system relies on electricity or the availability of local phone
service, it is not disaster-proof.
2. Build redundancy into your phone system. After a natural disaster,
telephone lines may be destroyed and cell phone coverage may be
spotty. Your phone system should be able to integrate both landline
telephones and cell phones for added redundancy and availability
3. Develop a contingency plan to take your office “virtual.” Develop a
written contingency plan and share it with your employees so that if
office phones are unavailable, your employees can take calls from home
or from phones outside the area of the disaster. Make sure your phone
system can automatically route calls to the proper employees in the
proper location.
4. Establish an emergency “hot-line.” A remotely hosted emergency
hot-line can be set up outside your normal phone system that will
allow employees to communicate even if your office is closed or
destroyed. You can coordinate business resumption and help workers and
their families know what is happening through posted messages or live
calls.
5. Implement a backup phone system. New backup phone services are
available, such as the PBX Parachute service from Virtual PBX, which
provides real-time backup to as many as 100,000 phone extensions.
6. Test your disaster preparedness. Once you have a backup system in
place, test it. If you are using a hosted PBX system as your backup,
turn off the power to your primary phone system and make sure that the
hosted PBX system properly activates.
7. Consider using a hosted phone system as your primary phone system.
Hosted phone systems are largely immune to natural disasters, because
they don’t require on-the-premises phone equipment, they don’t require
local electricity, and they don’t rely exclusively upon the
availability of your local phone service.
The most important thing of all is to be prepared before the disaster
hits. As Cheryl Ascott’s near brush with disaster illustrates, being
ready just one day in advance can make all the difference. To learn
more about disaster-resilient phone systems and backup phone systems
for businesses of all sizes, contact Virtual PBX at (888)825-0800 or
on the web at www.virtualpbx.com.
Courtesy of ARA Content
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