Business continuity is critical to modern businesses. Ensuring that business runs smoothly at all times requires a resilient voice solution to ensure seamless voice service for communication and collaboration.
A statistic in Forbes highlights that 4 out of 10 businesses close permanently due to a disaster, and a quarter of the businesses that reopen fail within the year. You can enhance the business continuity plan for your client or organization by choosing a voice solution with resilience-enhancing features.
Overcoming any disaster, outage, or interruption requires a robust business continuity plan. A cloud-based voice solution with resilient features can guarantee reliability, allowing your business or client to recover from an event with minimal impact on productivity and operations.
What Is Business Continuity, and Why Do Organizations Need It?
A lot of planning and forethought goes into running a company of any kind. To keep those strategically planned operations going, organizations rely on a combination of backup plans and intuitive technology. Business continuity is a process that ensures an organization can continue operations during an emergency, disruption, or event.
Your client or company requires business continuity to remain productive during unforeseen interruptions, including but not limited to the following.
- Cyberattacks
- Fires
- Natural Disasters
- Illness and Pandemics
- Network Outages and Interruptions
- Power Outages
A thorough and robust business continuity plan will prepare your company or client to recover from an event. Sometimes called disaster recovery, business continuity planning helps a business maintain its communications during and after an interruption.
How Can You Fortify Your Voice Calling for Business Continuity?
Seamless communication during an unforeseen event is a major player in business continuity. You can ensure your client or business maintains seamless communication by fortifying the resilience of its voice calling. Resilient voice solutions can withstand outages and interruptions using features like dynamic call routing with physical failover.
Related: Uninterrupted Communication: How Voice Resiliency Is Vital to Business Success
Remote availability can also be a defining feature of resilient voice. Interruptions may force staff members to work offsite, which doesn’t mean communication should come to a standstill. A voice calling option that is inherently remote, such as cloud-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) calling, ensures the workforce can quickly shift to remote work, maintaining operations and productivity.
Which Disaster Recovery Features Does Your Business Phone System Require?
Business continuity depends on voice resilience. Several features can enhance voice resilience to ensure your business or client’s mission-critical voice applications continue to operate during and after a disaster.
The features your client or organization requires depend on the unique operations of the business and the types of disasters likely to occur in the organization’s location. Consider how the following features can enhance and fortify your company or client’s business continuity strategy.
Dynamic Call Routing With Physical Failover
As briefly mentioned above, dynamic call routing with physical failover is critical to maintaining business continuity. During a network outage or interruption, calls will automatically be routed to a known working network.
Dynamic call routing can also be combined with direct inward dialing (DID). DID is a feature that assigns a number to a specific phone for a department or individual within the company. It allows the caller to bypass IVRs, receptionists, and extensions, reaching the intended recipient immediately.
A DID implementation alongside dynamic call routing with physical failover ensures that calls reach their destination, even if there is an outage or interruption. When the employee is offsite, the DID can be assigned to an accessible remote device or forwarded to the device via remote call forwarding.
Real-Time Monitoring
Reputable voice services offer real-time monitoring to ensure your communication networks are secure and reliable. A cloud-based voice provider can monitor your business or client’s network for interruptions and outages to resolve the issue quickly and maintain seamless communication.
You can also manually restrict destinations and set a maximum outbound rate from a simple administrative portal. Also consider international toll-fraud protection, which stops unauthorized users from accessing your company or client’s SIP trunk and alerts the administrator.
Secure Voice API and Microservices
While real-time monitoring can identify suspicious activity and interruptions in the voice network, securing the API and microservices your business is using can be equally critical. A secure voice API is up-to-date and tested, ensuring you’re implementing the most recent version. Keep in mind that APIs face the public internet and are popular vectors of attack. A report from Salt Security found that API attacks have increased by as much as 400% over a six-month period.
Microservices for phone number masking, E911, and other business-enhancing features must also be updated to ensure they are secure. Improve your client or company’s business continuity by working with a voice API provider that maintains updated microservices in a version-control system like GitHub.
Load Balancing
When your company or business is calling over the internet, it can leverage a network of devices to ensure calls are received. Load balancing allows call traffic to be split between several networking devices. It ensures that if there is an outage or interruption affecting one device, the other devices can take over to prevent dropped calls.
Scalability
In addition to features that promote reliability, scalability is critical in ensuring your business phone system has the capacity to receive and make calls. As demand increases, a cloud-based voice solution can dynamically allocate more resources without requiring additional onsite infrastructure and hardware.
The scalability of the cloud is nearly unlimited, allowing your company or client to increase its calling capacity for spikes in traffic. The cloud also offers elasticity to scale back down when demand is reduced.
Remote Call Forwarding
Remote call forwarding is a feature that allows your company or client to forward inbound calls to a remote device or DID number. This feature is essential for continuing operations when your business or client needs to shift to a remote work environment.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, most non-essential offices transitioned from an onsite to a virtual office arrangement. An organization that can forward calls to a remote device, such as an IP phone, software-based phone, or mobile phone, can also ensure calls reach their intended recipient remotely.
How to Identify a Resilient Voice Partner
When selecting a voice service provider, it’s vital to evaluate the features the partner offers to ensure business continuity. It’s also critical to assess the provider’s ability to handle your company or client’s calling capacity, availability, and security needs. Look for the following characteristics in your business communication partner.
Network and Voice Reliability
Reliability is critical to voice resilience. When selecting a cloud-based voice solution, look for a provider that offers unmatched uptime and reliability. The voice service provider should also offer features like dynamic call routing with physical failover, load balancing, and remote call forwarding. A reliable voice solution will guarantee the delivery of inbound and outbound calls, ensuring business continuity and productivity, even during a disaster.
Scalable Features and Options
Scalability is a necessity to ensure your voice solution is resilient. Choosing a cloud-based voice platform will provide inherent scalability, but selecting a provider that allows the business to scale with flexible pricing is also critical. The cloud enables the company’s voice calling to scale up with minimal limitations and offers elasticity to scale back down when the traffic returns to normal levels.
Related: Voice SIP: How Reliable Voice Calling Solutions Can Impact Your Business
When you work with a voice partner that offers flexible metered pricing, your client or organization will only pay for the call time used during a billing cycle. It allows the organization to scale without investing in new onsite infrastructure and equipment. Unlike services that use flat-rate pricing structures, the company won’t face financial consequences like unexpected fees when using more call time.
Security-Enhancing Features
In addition to scalability and reliability, security is critical when using an API. Unfortunately, APIs are vulnerable to attacks, and malicious actors are increasing in quantity and sophistication. An excellent cloud-based communication partner will provide features like real-time monitoring, toll fraud prevention, and destination restriction to improve the security of your company or client’s communications. The API provider will also keep up-to-date, secure API and microservices to ensure your system is hardened and resilient.
Enhance Your Business Continuity Plan With a Resilient Voice Solution
Voice resilience is critical to business continuity. You can contribute to the robustness of your client or organization’s disaster recovery plan by implementing the right features into their communications systems. Consider a voice API partner who offers reliability-enhancing options to deliver secure and seamless communications.
Flowroute delivers resilient voice for business continuity through our advanced HyperNetwork™ for voice calls. We guarantee delivery to DID numbers with dynamic physical failover that switches to a new physical network when there is an outage. Our voice network offers 99.999% reliability and 24/7 uptime to ensure your mission-critical voice applications are reliable and available to customers. Get started with a resilient voice solution from Flowroute.
