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VoIP is essentially a perfect fit for today’s shifting business culture, in which BYOD is becoming standard and organizations are operating on an anywhere, anytime premise of conducting business. It’s fairly simple to implement and enables a whole host of benefits from cost savings to mobility and portability to enhanced features and scalability.

While its benefits in today’s business culture are numerous, organizations considering a VoIP service provider should do their homework to ensure the services offered are a good match for their business. Of course price point, ease of integration and use and enhanced and managed services will all be important factors, and one of the services that often gets overlooked is data backup.

VoIP systems and their related softswitches and databases generate large amounts of data, which is essential to keeping call directories and systems running smoothly. That data absolutely must be backed up on a regular basis so organizations can continue to use their phone systems in the event of an emergency. A good VoIP service provider will offer backup as a value added service, and it’s important to understand just what that service entails before getting on board with a solution provider.

REVE Systems, a provider of mobile VoIP and IP communications platforms, offers the iTel Data Backup Service specifically tailored to VoIP service providers. The offering enables providers to maintain a mirror image of their softswitch database on another server so they may provide uninterrupted service to their customers no matter what their size or call volume may be.

REVE Systems offers the solution as a managed service, providing real-time data backup to softswitch owners. This enables them to cull backup data from both the main and replication server using their billing interface. The service is ideal for emergencies like servers going offline because of a colocation power failure or network failure as well as a HDD crash of the primary server. The iTel server will restore the database of the crashed server within 30 minutes, according to REVE.

Data backup is important for all services and applications, but especially so when it comes to VoIP. It can mean the difference between having your voice systems go down completely during an emergency or disaster and staying up and running, with complete backup imminent. It’s a no-brainer that your VoIP service provider should offer this valuable service and VoIP providers will ultimately need to provide it to stay competitive.