Business leaders meticulously plan for future growth and expansion but are often caught off-guard by disasters. Local storms, fires, power, and network outages continuously wreak havoc on organizations, meanwhile, large-scale disasters seem to be increasing in intensity and quantity. 2018 was a perfect example of costly weather-related disasters that hit the U.S. with Hurricane Florence and Michael at $22 billion combined and the tragic fires in California costing between $10-13 billion, respectively. 

Unfortunately, survey data shows that business leaders tend to believe they are better prepared than they actually are, as they typically do not have a granular view of their technical capabilities to resume business after an incident. This misunderstanding can greatly harm a business’s ability to resume operations quickly. According to The Institute for Business and Home Safety, 25 percent of businesses do not reopen following a major disaster. 

While IT leaders are generally prepared with solutions to get servers and data centers up-and-running quickly, business continuity for communications capabilities is often overlooked. This oversight can cause significant financial damage as customers that are unable to contact your business is likely to look or purchase elsewhere. Additionally, the reputational damage caused by the inability to communicate with a business can sometimes play a heavier role in the organization's failure than any other factor. 

“While every business is different, it is estimated that for some businesses, a communication system downtime can cost $5,600 per minute and as much as $540,000 per hour in more extreme scenarios.”

For businesses with phone systems that reside on-premise, a local disaster can effectively disconnect that site from the rest of the world. However, adopting a cloud-based unified communication system would allow users to accept inbound calls, forward calls to voicemail, or automatically reroute calls to a cell phone even if the business location is unavailable for an extended period of time. Staff members can seamlessly continue business operations to remain productive without customers knowing they are “homesourcing.” 

“Cloud-based voice, video, and instant messaging services have become the go-to method for ensuring communications business continuity.”  Learn more

More than ever before, businesses are exposed to a wider array of potential business disruptions. Whether a disaster is caused by natural causes, a cyber attack, employee- sabotage or any number of other issues, business continuity planning is the key survival. Regardless of cloud or on-premises architecture, your business should allocate the time and resources to update your recovery and continuity plans to include your communications systems today. Contact us today to learn more! 

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