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Protecting Business Continuity for VoIP

Like death and taxes, outages are one of lifes unavoidable realities. Unfortunately, for companies that rely on a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system to communicate, a power failure or Internet outage can result in thousands of dollars of lost revenue and hours of compromised productivity. In fact, VoIP outages can be so damaging that in February of 2012, the US Federal Communications Commission ruled that VoIP service providers are subject to the same outage reporting rules as other service providers. The causes of a VoIP outage range from a loss of power at a data center to glitches in Internet connectivity. But while its impossible to avoid outages altogether, there are steps enterprises can take to ensure business continuity. Heres how: 1. Create a back-up plan. A battery backup is critical to keeping companies up and running in the event of a VoIP outage. The good news is a battery backup that connects to a relatively low-power UPS (uninterruptible power supply) can cost as little as $200 a perfect solution for a small business. In the case of large enterprises, however, its important to determine what routers and switches will be connected to a UPS, and whether the UPS is capable of providing enough power for the entire span of an outage. Quality also counts: the higher the quality UPS, the faster it will switch over to battery power in the event of an emergency so select carefully. Other worthwhile investments include power and surge protection devices. 2. Keep your PSTN. Its one of the cardinal rules for maintaining business continuity: always maintain a public switched telephone network (PSTN) for failover use. Thats because a PSTN is one of todays most reliable, disaster-proof and accessible physical networks available. Companies can connect their VoIP system to the PSTN by using a VoIP gateway which acts as a bridge between an IP network and the PSTN. When a network connection goes down, the VoIP gateway will automatically decompress all of a VoIP systems inbound and outbound calls and convert these digital packets into an analog signal to be sent across the PSTN.

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Protecting Business Continuity for VoIP

3. Cherry pick providers. Long gone are the days when companies followed an all-you-can-eat approach to VoIP service from a single provider. Rather, these days, many companies choose to work with multiple VoIP service providers. For one thing, this strategy supports least-cost routing, enabling businesses to choose different providers to deliver different types of traffic, depending on which one offers the lowest rate possible for outbound calls. But a multi-provider approach to VoIP also means that if one service provider experiences an outage in its data center, a VoIP system can be trained to automatically flip over to another providers service for seamless redundancy. 4. Consider hot spares. Never underestimate the power of hot spares failover mechanisms that leap into action when a VoIP system encounters a problem. For a while, hot spares were out of reach for many cashstrapped companies. But given the reduced cost of VoIP systems, theres really no excuse not to have hot spares ready to switch into operation. This kind of built-in redundancy can be used for routers, switches and phone systems. But reasonable price point aside, arranging hot spares for every point in your VoIP chain is a bit like paying for your infrastructure twice an unnecessarily costly endeavor and a managerial nightmare. Thats why its critical companies decide which items on their VoIP network are most in need of redundancy, and to activate hot spares at each of those points. 5. Keep it in-house. If a company cant withstand a moment of downtime, then an on-premise VoIP system might be the only way to go. To be sure, these in-house systems require a sizable capital outlay in hardware and gear costs, not to mention the skills of a seasoned IT team. But with an on-premise VoIP system, a large enterprise can simply roll over to a PSTN. On the other hand, if a hosted VoIP system encounters a power failure, many companies will find themselves at the mercy of a third partys actions.

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Protecting Business Continuity for VoIP

6. Get it in ink. A carefully crafted service level agreement (SLA) cant prevent an outage but it can minimize damages. Guaranteed uptime in SLAs tend to range from 97 to 99.9 percent, depending on how much a company is willing to fork over for business continuity. Whats more, many VoIP providers offer credits for interruptions in service. And an SLA should always include a set Time-to-Repair a window (typically 4 hours) in which a provider has to correct a service problem before violating an SLA.

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