THANK GOODNESS FOR DISASTER RECOVERY PLANS

While talking to Bill at Taylored Systems the other day, he commented “Thank Goodness for Disaster Recovery Plans.” I asked him why, and Bill replied that on Friday, July 24th at 3:30PM when he was out of the office, someone cut the AT&T fiber outside the building knocking out the Taylored Systems phone lines. Of course, with our Disaster Recovery Plan, it didn’t matter if he was at the office or not because he has a strong team that knows how to execute the recovery plan. We have multiple ways to reroute all the telephone traffic in this type of situation:

1] reroute our calls to SIP trunks that come in on separate circuits to the building,

2] forward our extensions to cell phones, or other phones outside the office building, or

3] forward our lines to the live answering service we use for after hours and weekends.

So at 3:30PM that Friday we elected to send calls from our customers to the live answering service as the most convenient and efficient solution, since we would have forwarded our lines to them within the next hour and a half as usual. We could still call out using the SIP trunks( which are live all the time), so work went on for the rest of the day. Even our router for the internet according to Mark Sassman, an IT staff member, did its job correctly. It appears that when the main T1 internet connection drops for about one and one-half minutes it fails over to an alternate fiber internet connection on another carrier. This allowed for our SIP phone lines to keep on working even though our main phone lines had been cut, and email continued to flow in over the alternate connection to the server. This was a great example of disaster recovery technology at work compared to years ago when we might not have been able to continue helping our customers.

Bill checked to see that everything was up and working properly in the interim, and returned to the office at 7:00PM that night to let the AT&T repairman in to test the circuit, which came back up at 8:30PM. By Monday everything was back to normal as if it had never occurred. A Disaster Recovery Plan is something that we here at Taylored Systems use, as well as advocate for our customers. Please feel free to comment on this posting with stories of how your plan has saved your organization or how not having a plan has made it difficult to continue.

This was Mary Couch's most recent conversation with Bill Taylor.