Assuring Your Voice and Data System
Never Goes Down
Your System
Your voice and data system is the life blood of your organization. As business owners
we have to ask ourselves how much does it cost each hour our employees are unable
to work? One of the most critical requirements a voice and data dealer must be able
to do is provide you with an emergency response time. Our 60 plus years of experience
have demonstrated that we should be able to get a guaranteed response time of 4
hours from a great company. If a company cannot guarantee us a 4 hour response time,
fire them. Even if it is on the weekend at 1:00 AM in the morning! They should have
a technician on call 24 hours a day; that is how the best of the industry operates.
Our voice and data system needs redundancy. What does this mean? Our voice and data
systems provider need to be able to provide us with the appropriate connectivity
so that if something happens with our dial tone, VoIP, SIP trunking, whatever medium
we are getting dial tone from, there is an option for back up. If a company cannot
provide us with a back up solution to keep our dial tone up and running, fire them.
A common backup solution is a cellular gateway.
Our data system needs to be backed up. Imagine if our servers hard drive crashed
and our company lost all of its' files? All of our billing information, all contact
information, everything, what would we do? This is sometimes caused by natural disasters
such as lightning, flooding, or fire. It can also occur through hardware failure.
If our voice and data provider can't provide us with a backup solution, fire them.
By the way, great dealers will tell you a tape is a terrible back-up solution. Tape
needs to be taken off site every night in case of the natural disaster. Moreover,
what business owner wants someone walking around with their entire business on tape.
If tape is what they recommend, think twice.
What if the natural disaster that tears through your city also takes down our voice
and data provider? If our voice and data provider is not part of an organization
that provides solutions for this, fire them. Our voice and data provider also needs
to have a backup plan in place. Generally this is accomplished through membership
in a National Organization.
