Picture this: you’ve just invested in the latest and greatest VoIP phone system. It’s saving you money, increasing employee productivity, and making your life at work so much easier. Then, one day, disaster strikes and you experience – dun, dun, dunnn – a network Teams outage. What do you do?
Well, if you don’t have a failover service in place, you probably start to panic. How will you let your customers know about the issue? How long will it last? Should everyone just work from home the rest of the week?
But if you do have a failover service, you can stay as cool as a cucumber. And – here’s the important part – continue with your day as usual. You can make and take customer calls without any issue, even as your competition scrambles to restore service.
Sound like a dream come true? Well, that’s the magic of failover.
What is Failover?
In its simplest terms, failover is a backup operation that activates when your phone fails or your network experiences an outage. Your phone system will immediately switch from the faulty network to a backup network that’s still operational. Business continuity maintained! Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of what failover is, let’s dive into some of the biggest benefits failover can give your business.
Many things can cause network outages or service disruptions – from inclement weather to construction workers accidentally cutting the wrong cable to issues with a piece of proprietary hardware or software. A comprehensive failover service ensures you can be prepared to face them all. How? Several ways, actually.
- Geo-Redundancy. The best phone system providers have network endpoints across the globe. If Blackburn goes out, all Blackburn traffic will be automatically routed to the Southbank network.
- Active/Active Setups. What is an active-active setup? It’s a failover configuration where two or more endpoints (or “nodes”) are clustered together and are all actively processing data. This means there won’t be any time lost when the traffic transitions from one network to another.
If you’d like to get a little more technical, check this out!
Not All VoIP Phone Systems Have Real Failover in Place
Teams is down. In fact, all your Microsoft suite is down. How is this possible?! Many think that if it’s VoIP, it has failover. The reality is that you usually find out the hard way if your system does or does not have failover in place.
The worst feeling is when you have to say, “Oooops! My system does not have a geo-redundant setup! It’s just a server and not really Cloud.” You may be left scrambling, trying to patch together some options while your system is down. This is NOT ideal and can cost you thousands of dollars and customers.
Microsoft Downtime Causes Major Financial Hits
The good news is the number of outages isn’t increasing. The bad news is the cost of an outage is. According to Uptime Institute, over 60% of outages result in a minimum of $100,000 in total losses. And in higher-risk industries like banking, healthcare, and government, the cost of downtime can be as much as $5 million per hour. How? Because they’re missing out on crucial calls, sales opportunities, customer service opportunities and so many other activities that keep the revenue engine running. Ouch!
Did you know that Microsoft Teams can (and does) go offline? Do you have a plan? Having a phone system with built-in failover will ensure you can keep generating revenue in spite of any mishaps or outages. That’s where Yabbit can be your saviour. Don’t roll the dice when it comes to your uptime.
If you’re interested in calculating the cost of an outage for your company, use this formula:
Hourly Cost of Downtime = Hourly Lost Revenue [how much you normally sell in an hour] + Hourly Labor Cost [average hourly labor cost] + Hourly Recovery Costs [cost of restoring services] + Hourly Indirect Costs [estimated cost to your brand]
Don’t Let Your Brand Suffer
Nothing is more frustrating – and concerning – for customers than to call their provider and get a busy signal. Or worse, “the number you’ve dialed is not in service.” They’re left thinking the worst, with no way to confirm if the worst is true or not! Not only will this hurt your current business relationships, but this will also cost you some new customers and ultimately hurt your brand. After all, who’d want to do business with a company who can’t be reached reliably?
Having a failover service in place (plus a disaster recovery plan), like the one offered by Yabbit, will lessen your downtime considerably, and make sure you’re reachable 24/7/365. A fact your current and potential customers will greatly appreciate.
Get the Failover Solutions You Need with Yabbit
At Yabbit, we know that no company is immune to outages. That’s why our goal is to give you the best failover services possible, turning what could be week-long interruptions into a microscopic blip on your radar. With our n-Share technology, you’re guaranteed a phone system that’s reliable, resilient, and available no matter what. Interested? Hop on down the Yabbit hole – we’d be happy to get you started!