Every year as the weather turns worse, we start getting the first of the phone calls from customers who have a downed phone system.   Sometimes it’s electrical spikes.  Other times the power was off for an extended period of time and the UPS system quit before the power resumed.   Water damage happens often in tilt-up buildings and older San Francisco office buildings.  And one of the most common problems is on the outside – the AT& cabling had a weather-related failure.Unfortunately, disasters are a part of life here in the Bay Area.

Earthquakes, weather-related disasters, computer viruses, internet attacks and carrier failures are to name but a few.  As we grow increasingly inter-connected and more dependent upon a rich communications infrastructure we grow increasingly vulnerable to disaster.

Getting back to business after a disaster depends on preparedness planning done today. Businesses invest a tremendous amount of time, money and resources to make their ventures successful, and yet, while the importance of emergency planning may seem self-evident, it may get put on the back-burner in the face of more immediate concerns. Being prepared can mean staying in business following a disaster. An estimated 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster!

A survey by AT&T shows that almost one-third of U.S. businesses do not have continuity plans and nearly 40% do not have off-site back-up or redundant systems. This lack of preparedness comes despite the fact that two-thirds of those companies surveyed admit to having lost business because of previous disasters.

Do you have a plan for keeping your communications up and running in the event of a disaster?   Here are a few of the areas to consider:

POWER - Do you have an adequate UPS (battery backup system) in place?

ALTERNATE PATHS - If your T1 or PRI goes down, do you have back up lines?

PBX BACKUP - Do you have a current data backup of your system?

HARDWARE REDUNDANCY – Hard drives and power supplies fail

EMERGENCY CALL RE-ROUTING- if your system or service fails, do calls automatically get routed to another number?

ALTERNATIVE WORK SITE - Does your company have a plan in place to transfer calls to a secondary location in the event of disaster?

The above points illustrate some of the methods to reduce the chance of telecom failure and speed recovery from disasters.  In a bit of good news on a bleak subject, many of the measures are inexpensive and easy to implement.

To help you identify the areas of vulnerability and how to protect your business, I have created a “Communications Disaster Prevention & Recovery Guide”.  If you want a copy, just let me know and I’ll email it right out.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Randy Kremlacek

Teledynamic Communications provides free educational materials about telecommunications on an ongoing basis to our subscribers and customers. We are a provider of a complete range of VOIP, telecom and data solutions for business.