When we think of disasters, we think of typhoons sweeping small islands off the map and earthquakes devastating entire towns.  We think of droughts and epidemics, planes coming down and bombs going off—things worthy of the term ‘disaster’.

But these are hardly the disasters we are referring to when we talk about the hot topics of business continuity and disaster recovery. These disasters are much smaller events—and include circumstances that could happen to any business virtually any day of the week, with no warning.  These are the things that are actually likely to happen at some point over the course of the year, and in fact did happen in London last week. A fire in the underground Victorian tunnels in Holborn caused nearly 5000 people to be evacuated.  Businesses stopped, people walked out mid-email, halfway through phone conversations not even able to grab their jacket in some instances.  It took the London Fire Brigade 36 hours to put out the flames.

So rather than not think about ‘disasters’ because you don’t think you are likely to experience an earthquake or tsunami, do think about the small everyday things that can happen; and then think about what tools you have to mitigate their impact.

For example:

- What if a pipe bursts or the office above has a plumbing problem?  Your office could end up with equipment and stock damaged, computers out of commission, telephones down and potentially an uninhabitable office.

- What if your building or one nearby has a fire?  This is an all too real concern, especially in London, with the Battersea Arts Centre fire a few weeks ago, and then Holborn last week.  Fires happen all the time and are completely unpredictable.  They also force you to leave immediately and can take everything.

- What if you have a small team and a key employee breaks a leg?  The person will have difficulty getting to work and may have difficulty doing their job.  The consequences could affect your company for weeks.

- What if a nasty cold takes out almost all of your customer service team because the first person ill couldn’t work from anywhere but the customer support desk? These days teams sit within  a few feet of each other.  When one person gets ill, lots do, usually because the person keeps coming to work because they can’t work for home and aren’t ill enough to be in bed.

- What if your star manager becomes pregnant and needs to work from home unexpectedly for large periods of time?  You need her fully functioning at home in order to keep the business moving forward, seamlessly able to work just as she would from the office.

Hosted VoIP phone systems are one clear, affordable way you can mitigate these issues, help ensure productivity isn’t lost and prevent a major slow down. A hosted VoIP system is ‘hosted’ because the service provider hosts all the equipment—there is no equipment on site except for your phones. So in the event of a fire, flood or other physical office issue, a business phone service provider like VTSL could get you up and running on mobiles, in homes, or in a temporary office instantaneously.

A hosted VoIP phone system allows you to:

- Divert calls to mobiles: Call our support desk on your way down the fire escape and we will have your company’s calls re-routed to employee mobiles before you even step on to the pavement.

- Use soft clients:  By ‘soft clients’ we mean apps for your mobile phone or tablet that allow you to use the device as your office phone.  Make and receive calls on your office number.  We can get an employee up and running on their mobile phone / tablet in about 15 minutes.

- Use home worker phones:  If you have someone you know will be home for a while, we can get a Mitel 5340 (or whatever phone they have at work) delivered to their house, ready to use, within 24 hours.

- Retain all system features and programming: No matter what happens on site, each person’s settings, speed dials, and other programmable keys will be safe in the cloud for when they log in to their (potentially new) phone next.

- Change and access voice mail from anywhere: Letting your customers know your office is experiencing a problem can easily be done through a company voice mail change, even from outside the office.  VTSL customers are able to call our support desk and we will do it for free.

Ready for a hosted VoIP phone system or want to learn more about the one you have? Give us a call on 0207 078 3200, and don’t let disasters stop you!