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Disaster Recovery your phone system

Date : 16 Sep 2009 (Total Views: 408)

Let’s think a bit about how a company with and without a solid Disaster Recovery Plan would survive in a complete systems meltdown.

A disaster recovery plan is a serious matter whereby alot of companies just overlook as they grow until the first disaster hits. In big corporations, whereby there are several individuals in charge of ensuring this process is mapped, documented and trialled, the reality is that many small-medium sized businesses just don’t have the resources nor do they put priority in this.

1. Without a proper Disaster Recovery Plan

Company A has started small, grew into a 50 man operations and receives sales from customers through a small call center. They have a custom built application developed by an individual who has been around for the past 10 years. This application is the core application and runs on a relatively old IBM server with RAID 1 mirroring. Tape backups are in place and have been running as a daily process run by the secretary. The phone system is a Panasonic based PBX with an ISDN 10 in place.

A third party IT personnel is sourced somewhere from someone they know and he’s been supporting them off and on for a couple of years.

The infrastructure is probably what anyone would say a typical small business environment. There are UPSes installed on the server and a minimal “what to do when failure” is discussed.

One risk here is that the company is reliant on an individual who has not been audited by a third party nor the risks highlighted if and when the individual leaves or is unable to support the company anymore.
Also, when the server fails, the company would be reliant on someone who might not be in the country during that time for example.

Tape backups fail as tapes get older and older and tape drives are pretty hardware dependent.

Then comes the phone system … How long do you have to wait for a new phone system or the technician to come out and fix the problem?

Disaster hits and you have a small fire in the company killing the server and the phone lines.

Guess what, you’re looking at a good 1-2 weeks down time. Good luck in losing sales.

2. With a Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan is only as good when the plan itself is executed as a drill every now and then. This plan would cover the disaster recovery of all critical systems including the phone system.

With a normal phone system, it’s pretty much difficult to have a good disaster recovery plan as the hardware itself is proprietary and without actually buying one more PBX, you’re pretty much hoping that these don’t fail in the years to come.

With a software based PBX like the voip phone systems from 3cx, you’re actually consolidating all the critical systems in a single pot, thus it becomes easier to manage.

As long as your IT server backup and recovery disaster recovery process is well documented and tested, your phone system itself will already be covered. This is one big advantage of having a phone system on your server itself. Not only does it help with saving infrastructure costs during implementation, but it is when disaster recovery is required, you’ll find that the phone systems are all covered as well.

The big question mark now is whether your disaster recovery plan itself is good enough at the moment for your server environment.

Take a step back and get your IT provider to give you a disaster recovery plan with a projected down time. It is pretty easy to come up with a scenario based projection, example, if the mother board fails, or if the memory chip fail and it was from a technology 10 years ago. Good luck in getting the server back up.

Nowadays, there are technology which does snap shots of your server and can be restored in any new hardware as well.