A robust business continuity plan is essential to maintaining operations and minimizing risk to the organization during disruptions. Forbes reported that 4 out of 10 small businesses fail to reopen after a natural disaster—and the businesses that do reopen risk failure within a year. Your client or business depends on voice service to collaborate internally and connect with customers.
Incorporating voice into your disaster recovery strategy is vital to its success. A reliable voice communications provider can ensure your organization or client can prepare for disruptions and overcome any challenges its business phone systems face.
What Is a Business Continuity Plan?
Business continuity plans prepare an organization for unforeseen outages and interruptions. Even minor outages can cause a loss of productivity and cost the company hundreds or thousands of dollars per minute.
One study found that small businesses can lose between $100 and $400 per minute on average during an unplanned outage. A strategy to continue operations during an interruption can ensure your client or business minimizes its losses and remains productive while waiting for service to be restored.
Business continuity is sometimes called disaster recovery. Your company or client’s plans may involve mitigating the damage caused by an outage or emergency. It should also provide a strategy to recover from unforeseen events, such as pandemics, natural disasters, or power outages. A business continuity plan allows the organization to continue operations and maintain normal productivity levels.
Why Is Resilient Voice Communication Critical to Business?
When developing a business continuity plan with voice, resiliency should be an integral component. Resilient voice service will ensure that inbound calls reach their intended recipients and that outbound calling can continue without disruption. Cloud-based voice services, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) allow your organization or client to harness the scalability, reliability, and mobility of the cloud with a resilient voice solution.
Related: Uninterrupted Communication: How Voice Resiliency Is Vital to Business Success
Voice communication is essential to collaborating internally and keeping in touch with clients. An organization’s critical voice applications can remain available 24/7 with an uptime exceeding 99.99%. A resilient voice service guarantees inbound and outbound call delivery by dynamically rerouting voice traffic to the shortest path and failing over to a working network during an outage.
What Are the Challenges of Maintaining Consistent Voice Communication?
There are various challenges to maintaining voice communications. Your company or client should have a business continuity plan that addresses each challenge and prepares the organization to maintain consistent voice service during an emergency or outage.
Onsite Issues
Technical issues and other onsite incidents can cause outages and interruptions to voice services, harming operations and productivity. Onsite issues that interrupt operations include power and network outages, renovations, fires, and utility issues. Temporary closure of facilities may be necessary to resolve such issues, and with traditional voice communication, it can be impossible to continue operations.
When your company or client has a business continuity plan with reliable voice service, operations can continue offsite if necessary. You can also ensure network outages don’t interrupt continuous calling. Resilient voice networks guarantee the delivery of inbound calls by dynamically routing calls to working networks and seamlessly failing over to a new physical network to avoid disruptions.
Natural Disasters
Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, and wildfires can shut down onsite operations and require workers to continue working from another location for their safety. With a robust voice strategy, your company or client can prepare for these emergencies with the mobility to continue operations offsite without interruptions.
Cloud-based voice services, such as VoIP and SIP, are inherently mobile communications. Authorized users can access the business phone system from a compatible device and stable internet connection anywhere in the world. Cloud-based solutions can make calls from software-based phones, IP phones, and mobile phones using Wi-Fi, LTE, and 5G technology, making it easy to continue operations remotely.
Illness and Pandemics
The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call for many organizations without mobile voice capabilities. Companies with a business continuity strategy that prepared them for remote work could quickly switch to a virtual office environment to comply with stay-at-home and lockdown policies.
While many businesses are back in the office or have moved to a more flexible office arrangement, having mobile communications can prepare your client or company for similar disruptions when it is safer to work from home.
Your business continuity plan should allow your business or client to quickly adapt to a remote work environment. VoIP and SIP trunking facilitate remote work to ensure the organization’s operations can continue offsite.
Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks are a major cause of network interruptions and outages. As a developer, you can prepare your company or client for cyberattacks to ensure operations can continue and communications are secure. An application programming interface (API) allows you to integrate voice communication into your client or company’s software and systems.
While it’s a popular vector for cyberattacks, it’s crucial to secure your voice API with the help of a reputable communication partner. A survey conducted by Salt Security found that attacks on APIs have increased by 400% over a six-month period, with 9 out of 10 respondents reporting an API-related issue in the last year, according to Infosecurity Magazine.
You can ensure your business or client’s communications are secure by choosing a voice API provider that monitors its networks for suspicious activities and maintains updated security measures.
How Can You Incorporate Voice Into Your Business Continuity Plan?
Incorporating voice into your business continuity plan ensures your company or client will have consistent communications during a disruption. The following considerations will prepare your client for unforeseen events and reduce interruptions.
Ensure the Scalability of Your Voice Services
A scalable voice service will grant your company or client the calling capacity to take inbound calls during a surge in traffic. Without scalability, even an organization with a disaster recovery plan can face challenges in receiving calls. The scalability your client or business receives from a cloud-based voice service, such as SIP or VoIP, ensures it has near-unlimited calling capacity to meet inbound call demands.
An ideal communication provider allows your client or organization to scale its voice services to meet an increase in demand and scale back down without financial consequences. With VoIP or SIP, you can leverage the elasticity of the cloud with no need for costly onsite hardware and infrastructure. You can choose a flexible metered payment structure for your company or client to ensure they only pay for the voice service they use, and you can test the calling solution without a significant initial investment.
Use Reliable Voice Communication Networks
A communications partner with a reliable voice network will guarantee the delivery of inbound calls. When there is a network outage, a resilient VoIP or SIP service will reroute incoming traffic to a new physical network to ensure inbound calls are received. If your company or client uses direct inward dialing (DID) numbers, a reliable voice network will route inbound calls to the correct recipient so that callers reach their intended destination even during an outage.
Maintain API and Voice Network Security
In addition to system reliability, voice networks should be secure to ensure business continuity. You can secure your company or client’s voice communications by partnering with a voice service provider that monitors its networks for suspicious activity, restricts unwanted destinations, and detects toll fraud.
Related: Custom Voice Solutions: The Role of Voice API for Developers
As a developer, you’re likely implementing VoIP or SIP service using a voice API. Ensure your communications provider keeps your API and microservices updated and secure in a version-controlled repository like GitHub. Using the most recent API and microservice releases will harden your business or client’s systems while protecting users and communications from cyberattacks.
Provide Mobile Voice Solutions to Ensure Operations Can Continue Remotely
If your client or company’s users need to work offsite, their voice communications should offer mobility for remote work. Authorized users can access the business VoIP or SIP from a compatible mobile device using their home internet connection.
Cloud-based solutions make it easy to shift to a remote work environment when it’s unsafe to come to the office. Remote call forwarding is a feature that voice communication providers offer to route calls to another device without the caller needing to know an alternate phone number. That way, calls can be received when a user is offsite, providing business continuity.
Ensure the Reliability of Mission-Critical Voice Applications With a Resilient Voice Provider
Voice service is a crucial component of your business continuity strategy. Plan around the challenges and prepare your client or company to overcome emergencies and outages with a quality voice partner. The right voice solution will protect your organization or client with scalability, reliability, security, and mobility to maintain operations and productivity during unforeseen events.
Flowroute can assist you with VoIP and SIP communications over our resilient HyperNetwork™. We offer updated APIs and microservices so you can securely implement the calling features your organization or client demands. Get started with our resilient voice services for your mission-critical voice applications.
