Reliable communications are essential to your business. In fact, surveys have found that small businesses lose on average $55,000 a year due to IT solutions downtime. Obviously, this can be significantly damaging to a small business, as you know if you are reading this blog. The types of downtime that can affect your business range from physical hardware issues to network downtime and the damage can range from lost revenue, employee productivity, and damage to the brand image and reputation. This is true not just for your internal systems and networks but your outbound solutions like phones and website. So what are the essentials of call reliability with Cloud-Based Hosted PBX solutions?
Three Strategies to Look For From Your Cloud-Based Hosted PBX Provider
The hunt for the right provider is a massive task. There are several different ways you can accomplish the same thing, depending on your needs, budget, and current internal resources. But there are specific things a provider can do that can help increase the call reliability of your Cloud-Based Hosted PBX telephony service and reduce the risk of downtime. Three big ones to look for, aside from the standard offerings, are geographic distribution (geo-redundancy), active-active architecture, and dual registration of the endpoints.
Geographic Distribution – How dispersed is the network infrastructure providing the service to your Cloud-Based Hosted PBX? For obvious reasons, having only one data center or colo for a network can lead to significant downtime in the event of a natural disaster (think hurricanes, tornados, or earthquakes) and even human error that could bring down the power grid to the data center. Geographic distribution, or geo-redundancy, signifies that a network is operating in two or more distinct geographical locations in case the primary site fails, and can significantly increase the call reliability for your Cloud-Based Hosted PBX.
Active-Active Architecture – active-active architecture means that all services are provided simultaneously from multiple locations, and this strategy separates itself from the more common n+1 architecture. With the n+1 architecture, the “back-up” node is only brought into service once the primary node has failed. This means that information (such as call records, voice mail messages, etc.) may be unavailable as the back-up service is brought on-line. With active-active architecture, all information is duplicated across multiple backup nodes and synchronized in real-time. This means that should a node fail, whether from hardware, power-grid, or natural disaster, the backup architecture is already up and active and ready to process the traffic, ensuring seamless failover.
Dual Registration End Points – Phones that utilize dual registration are simultaneously registered to two colo’s in separate geographic locations. If the users call fails to reach the server within a predefined time frame, the phone will automatically reach out to the second registered colo, seamlessly failing over and often goes unnoticed by the user. If a solution does not utilize dual registration, the phones have to be manually re-routed to the secondary location individually. This results in downtime as you scramble to point every phone to the backup location. In the event of a very short break in service, you could be scrambling multiple times as you first point the phones to the secondary location and then back to the primary when it is back up. Dual registration automates this process for you, saving you time and lost productivity and is just one of the essentials to the call reliability of your Cloud-Based Hosted PBX.
MIX Networks Cloud-Based Hosted PBX Ensures Call Reliability
MIX Networks takes call reliability seriously. We have combined geographic diverse and geo-redundant server nodes in colocation facilities across the United States. Each facility has backup generators and 24/7/365 security to ensure the reliability of their location. Additionally, MIX Networks utilizes Remote Monitoring and Management processes with each of their facilities, providing real-time information to our engineers of the status of each server. This enables our team to instantly know if a problem is occurring and where streamlining any manual processes that may need to be performed to ensure that your business phones remain active. We take reliability seriously. Contact us today to learn how our boutique style of service is different and how we can help your business succeed.
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