By now, most have heard of the devastation Hurricane Harvey unleashed on the greater Houston area. Even now, writing this very article, Houston is still largely affected a week out of the of the storm and many families and business have since been displaced with no sight on when things will return to normal.
It’s times like these that the concept of “business continuity” comes into play. It’s oddly a topic that has mostly been about data, power, and internet connectivity but what about telephony? The reality is when big problems occur and people are trying to figure out what’s next email, texts, web portals, and so on go by the way side and people pick up the phone and dial.
We are happy to report that many of the BVoIP IT & MSP partners in the Houston area have continued operations despite the outages and physical disruption caused by the storm. Our partners have been able to literally have their folks work remotely anywhere and everywhere they can get power and internet even if it’s just 4G service. Many of our partners sent some of their team out of the area prior to the bigger part of the storm hitting and have continued to keep the operations running as a result of many of their systems (including phones) being cloud based and unaffected by physical gear going down.
We have also heard from Huston based BVoIP partners that the ability of BVoIP to quickly fire up Cloud PBX instances for their customers that are trying to temporarily keep their business afloat has provided a great way for them to “save the day.” We have been told that this has also been able to create a silver lining as prospective customers who are trying to find anyone who can help them get back to semi functional have been helped as a result of the BVoIP Cloud PBX platform.
With two new storms being tracked and possibly en route to the Florida coast time is limited to figure out how to prepare for what could be a Houston Style storm aftermath. While many people reading this article may be in areas where massive natural disasters are not very prevalent; it’s important to understand how to overcome the geographical limitations of on-prem equipment and systems especially when entire areas are offline, under water, or largely not safe due to storm damage.
We here at BVoIP are happy that we can help arm our partners with the tools to help their customers and prospective customers with the best strategies to keep business going in the event overwhelming circumstances when mother nature hits the hardest.
