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Telecom Continuity Strategies in the Cloud Era: SOHO Edition

As you likely heard on April 27th Northern Alabama suffered a spate of violent storms, including a number of large tornados. Many thousands of people were impacted, including long term loss of power and network connectivity. Digium was amongst the many, many businesses impacted by the events of the day.

I must commend Danny Windam, CEO of Digium, for making excellent use of the corporate blog to keep the Asterisk community informed about the companies operational status. Some time having elapsed since the unfortunate events of that day Digium has since returned to normal operations.

Further to those events, Bryan Johns, Community Director at Digium, has written a post for No Jitter called, “Business Telecom Continuity Strategies in the Cloud Era.” This article describes some considerations relating to business continuity from the perspective of both the tornados in Alabama and recent Amazon EC2 outages. It’s a good read and should get you thinking about how you might develop or enhance a business continuity plan.

Business continuity is normally something discussed within larger enterprises, but even a home office dweller should give some serious thought to they might carry on after a natural disaster. Living as we do in Houston (aka Hurricane Alley) we’ve had our fair share of experience in this area, most notably in the period after Hurricane Ike in the fall of 2008.

Long ago, the idea of working from a home office much less common. Further, it was something that I brought to the table when I decided to move to Texas. It was nowhere on my employers horizon. Because of this, I’m very serious about ensuring that my office operations are at least as reliable as those in our corporate HQ. That includes having a disaster recovery strategy.

As we are approaching June 1st, which is the formal start of hurricane season, I’ll be giving some thought to how we do things hereabouts, and presenting those strategies here one-by-one.

This Post Has One Comment
  1. Mike,

    I work out of my home office a majority of the time and I found the best is K-I-S-S. I use Vitelity for SIP DIDs and each is pointed to my Panasonic KX-NCP switch. Voicemail, auto attendant, simultaneous ring is all hosted locally, but I also have voicemail from Vitelity activated on the DIDs just in case something goes wrong/unanswered. In the event the server is unreachable, I have the failover set for each DID to my RingAlice.com live operator service. My business card has my local ten-digit DID listed as well as my answering service 800# so if one DID becomes completely unusable, then it is up to the caller to try dialing the other number with hopes it follows completely different routing. I give my potential caller the options upfront in my contact info and I set up the technology to use those options transparently whenever needed.

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