Are Considering IP Telephony? Don’t Overlook Disaster Recovery!!!

Are Considering IP Telephony? Don’t Overlook Disaster Recovery!!!

As you consider which IP telephony system to choose for your organization’s needs, remember that unplanned downtime—whether it results from a sprinkler system that malfunctions in your head office to a Category 6 hurricane that temporarily knocks out an entire region of the country - is all but inevitable. Preparing to recover your voice system from an irritating inconvenience or a full-blown natural or man-made crisis must figure in your consideration of the various IP PBXs on the market. Here are a few considerations to help you build your disaster recovery plan for your IP phone system.

Highly Reliable Architecture. First, you’ll want to choose a voice system with a highly reliable architecture—reliable both from the standpoint of the necessary hardware and that of the operating system and applications running on it, such as auto-attendant and voicemail. System availability, with 99.999% availability widely considered the gold standard, is typically determined by comparing how often system hardware fails to the percentage of time the system is available.

Component Redundancy. Component redundancy will allow failover to another server, room or office in the next state should weather or another incident knock your IP telephony system offline for a while. A backup location in another town with dedicated networking infrastructure is a good place to start plotting out a disaster-recovery plan. Choose your secondary site based on your organization’s size, client base or business coverage area. Look for an IP PBX that supports N+1 redundancy. With N+1 redundancy, you’ll only need one additional system to backup all of the switches at a site. Some IP telephony providers support NxN redundancy, which means that you’ll need to buy a spare switch for each and every switch at a location if you want to be sure that phone service continues during an incident. Remember, NxN redundancy can get expensive fast!!!

Mean Time Between Failure Availability can be measured by calculating the average mean time between system failures (MTBF) of hardware components in the system. Per Wiki ‘Calculations of MTBF assume that a system is "renewed", i.e. fixed, after each failure, and then returned to service immediately after failure. The average time between failing and being returned to service is termed mean down time (MDT) or mean time to repair (MTTR).’

Ability to Work Remotely. If an event precluded workers from working in their usual offices and using their main telephone system, you need to find a system that simplifies the process of working remotely. You have to look for the system that gives users who must suddenly and temporarily work from home or a remote office the ability to go to another telephone on or off the network, log into a voicemail box, and assign internal extensions to external phone numbers that can be a cell phone or land line.

Network Redundancy. Next, think about network redundancy. Keep in mind that due to Quality of Service (QoS) issues, LANs and in particular WANs have lower reliability than do telecommunications systems like the PSTN. As such, you’ll want an IP telephony system that links both to the PSTN and backup WAN connections, which will permit the automatic re-routing of calls should a network become unavailable.

Backup Power. Lastly, you’ll need a plan for power backup to the office. If the organization rolling out IP telephony has redundancy built into its data network, the phones should still work if the power fails at the site. But if IP telephony switches go offline because servers go offline, IP phones will not work. Thus, a backup power source for the network is essential. For organizations with large physical plants, this may be less of an issue. Mid-sized or smaller companies that load up electrical outlets with copiers, printers and other gear must ensure that they have adequate power supplies in place to keep their IP telephony system online in the event of a power failure.

As you consider the move to IP telephony and how your organization would recover from a small power outage or a large-scale natural disaster, keep these considerations in mind. The preparation of a plan that will guide your organization is more than just a theoretical exercise - it’s common sense.