Hosted Solutions Help with Disaster Recovery

“In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data.”

There’s a reason that this quote, attributed to consultant W. Edwards Deming, is a favorite of billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Data can be a helpful clarifying agent.

Case in point: Disaster recovery.

We all know that we need a disaster recovery plan for our business. But many of us don’t prioritize it highly enough, especially if we are running a small business.

But what if I told you that downtime costs the average small business $6,900 per hour of lost time, which is the estimate according to some experts. Or that an hour of downtime costs $74,000 per lost hour for mid-sized companies?

Data makes a big difference, doesn’t it? With those numbers, disaster preparation sounds a little more important than we give it credit.

While human nature says that we will put off what can be ignored today, thankfully disaster recovery is now easier than ever.

Cloud computing is changing business, and one of the ways that it is helping the business world is by building in added flexibility and redundancy that can be leveraged in times of emergency.

That’s because most hosting providers have distributed data centers, unlike many businesses that put all their eggs in one basket by housing their computers and communications network in one place. And in many cases, these hosting providers also include redundancy in case their equipment fails.

This means that using cloud solutions are safer in most cases, and a good hedge against disaster.

With a hosted or virtual PBX solution, for instance, a business doesn’t stop functioning if a natural disaster cripples an office, or a local utility has trouble with its telephone network.

With a hosted PBX solution, a business can seamlessly reroute calls or take the office with them as they move to a new location. Calls are not disrupted, the PBX system does not go down, that $74,000 or more is not lost to the disaster.

Disasters by definition will make business more challenging, even for organizations are prepared. But with the cloud and its inherent resiliency, businesses have a leg up when it comes to such curveballs. A disaster will still cause a scramble, but it need not lead to an economic disaster as well for most businesses.

Edited by Alisen Downey