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As companies rely more and more on IP fax solutions to fuel business at the enterprises level, it’s important that the selected technology be adequately supported in the event of a system failure.

 

With businesses continuing to adopt IP fax solutions, the action is bringing more attention to the notion of survivability. Sagem-Interstar, an IP fax solutions provider, spoke about the topic in a recent webcast, called “Advanced FoIP Networking Considerations.”

 

During the event, Matthew Miller, product manager at Sagem-Interstar (News - Alert), defined survivability as the capability of a solution to withstand partial or total system failures, or even a catastrophic disaster, without significantly impairing its normal operations.

 

But even with technological advancements today, disasters still strike, Miller said. In fact, some 27 percent of companies have declared at least one disaster that negatively impacted their business over the last five years, according to Forrester Research (News - Alert). Such situations can include a natural disaster, a power or network interruption or an application failure, Miller said.

 

So what’s the downtime impact on IP Fax solutions? Miller said it can be extensive and depends on the nature of the business. IT decision makers must take this into account when building a business continuity plan, as pictured below, and selecting the systems that will fulfill their recovery objectives.

When measuring downtime, a company must consider the loss of revenue, decreased employee productivity, as well as compliance or regulatory reporting penalties or fees. In addition, organizations should consider the impact on corporate reputation as customers may be unable to communicate with the company and the adverse impact on customer service could be significant.

 

“When we measure downtime… we have to consider other types of expenses (i.e. temporary resources, IT costs and rentals) that might be incurred in order to continue doing business which were not necessarily planned,” Miller said.

 

Sagem (News - Alert)-Interstar’s webcast was the final event in a three-part series on “Demystifying Fax over IP”, presented jointly with Cisco’s (News - Alert) David Hanes, who is also co-author of the Cisco Press bible on “Fax, Modem and Text for IP Telephony.”

 

To learn more about FoIP survivability, tune in to Sagem-Interstar’s (News - Alert) webcast recording here.