Disaster and VoIP

As we have seen last week with the Amazon cloud outage and a couple weeks before that with the hurricane, cloud services can be knocked down either by huge service traffic or natural disasters. These are outages that left many companies with crippled telephone service and spotty cellphone coverage for days. In fact, the Federal Communications Commission reports that about 25 percent of wireless cell towers throughout the country’s Northeastern states were completely out of commission after the storm. Despite the loss of cell towers and the degradation of telecom infrastructure, many VoIP providers continued to provide uninterrupted service to its business customers across the East Coast. Traditional telecommunication providers depend on their major data centers for power which, in the throes of a hurricane, can lead to lost land line communications. VoIP providers, on the other hand, can route calls over IP networks as long as there’s an internet connection. While VoIP’s reliance on the internet promises better availability in times of trouble, Irvine says VoIP systems still need to be configured properly to ensure ongoing availability and redundancy patterns. For this reason, Irvine recommends that small to medium-sized businesses take advantage of hosted or multi-tenant VoIP solutions in which the vendor handles all of the PBX functions including routing calls via the internet.