Hurricane Irene left a mess. And for some businesses, employees couldn’t even call people to tell them about it. That’s because some landline phone providers won’t be providing all of their normal service for a week or two.

But that’s not the case with customers of Lawrence, N.Y.-based cloud telephony provider NewTel (News - Alert) Systems.

This is great news given that even many NewTel employees lived in a high-risk zone, and were forced to evacuate to higher ground. In fact, some were able to return to their homes only two days after the storm hit Long Island. When some of the NewTel employees reached the Lawrence headquarters, they also found that part of the building was on fire because a local electrical system was damaged by the storm. The building was ordered closed by emergency responders.

But NewTel’s office systems are cloud based, so operations were running at another location within hours.

“As a provider of phone services for many small businesses in the New York area, it was critical for us to be available to support our customer recovery efforts,” Aryeh Freund, NewTel CEO, told a Flat Planet Phone Company blog.

One of benefits with the cloud-based telephony service is its disaster recovery capabilities, Flat Planet explained.

“I can talk about DRS till I am blue,” Freund said. “But the last two days have proven beyond a doubt how important having a DRS plan is for any sized business.”

In addition, NewTel has seen many new customers after landline phone providers told them it may be 10-14 days until phone service is back in some portions of New York State – with that old fashioned kind of service.

“Skeptics used to say to me, we don’t want to rely on the cloud for our telephony, it is way too risky,” Freund said. “They must be eating their hats now.”

TMCnet reported that Hurricane Irene wreaked havoc along much of the East Coast of the United States. The storm caused some $2.6 billion worth of damage, and almost 8 million homes and businesses along the U.S. East Coast lost power

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

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