DisasterUnexpected catastrophic outages are sort of like root canals, shoplifters, and Pauly Shore movies – you sort of have a vague impression that they exist, but you never expect them to actually happen to you.

Last Thursday, it happened to me.

So, for years now, I’ve been promoting why BroadSoft’s hosted business services provide disaster recovery and business continuity that simply can’t be matched by premises-based PBXs or Unified Communications systems.

This is a pretty simple concept – if your communications system is hosted ‘in the cloud’, then you’re protected from any flood, fire, or other disaster at your site. Your communications data and services are all protected in a managed network, and services like BroadWorks Anywhere allow you to continue running your business from your mobile or other devices, even if your primary phones are unavailable.

In fact, BroadSoft-based service provider Telesphere won an industry award –Most Innovative Disaster Recovery Service – based on this very functionality. In Telesphere’s case, one of their customers, Warehouse 86 in Memphis, had a site decimated by a tornado, and in the aftermath of the tornado, several fires broke out, making it impossible to gain access to the site. Yet throughout all this, Warehouse 86 didn’t miss a single call or voice mail, and all employees were able to continue making calls using their mobiles during the outage.

So – back to last week – around 3pm, this popped up on my mobile:

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Sure enough, a contract crew on the street outside our offices accidentally cut all of our access to the outside world. No data in or out of our Gaithersburg headquarters.

But – since our communications service is provided ‘in the cloud’ in a hosted data center, all of our phone numbers stayed live. Gaithersburg and all our other global sites continued to receive incoming calls on our mobiles via BroadWorks Anywhere (many of us were out of the office meeting customers anyway; we use BroadWorks Anywhere every day). All of our voice mail and video mail stayed active. All of our BroadWorks conferencing bridges stayed live, and all of the BroadWorks Call Centers that are used for our technical support organization stayed live. Even our integrated Microsoft Office Communicator Unified Communications presence stayed live – when I would make or receive a call on my mobile, my OCS presence state would change to “In A Call”, so my BroadSoft and colleagues in Montreal, Melbourne, Sydney, Belfast, and other sites (which did not lose physical connectivity and therefore saw no issues) were able to see my telephony status.

In business telephony – outages aren’t an option. If we’d had a premises-based system, we’d have been out for the count and entirely disconnected from our colleagues round the world. But with our hosted BroadWorks solution, we stayed productive, and responsive to our customers and partners.

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