More than a year after Hurricane Sandy buffeted the East Coast, taking down phone lines across the Northeast and causing billions of dollars in damage and lost business, business continuity is certainly top of mind for companies. Unforeseen disasters can take telephone systems offline for hours or days, disrupting a business’ ability to communicate with customers, vendors and employees. And with the cost of downtime estimated at $42,000 per hour for small and mid-sized businesses, hours of downtime can quickly add up to a hefty price tag.

Businesses can’t afford to wait until a disaster strikes to deal with phone system vulnerabilities. According to the Customer Experience Impact Report from RightNow Technologies, 50 percent of customers give businesses one week to respond to a query before they take business elsewhere. An unforeseen event, like Hurricane Sandy, can take down on-premise phone systems for much longer, resulting in high costs and the potential for losing customers far into the future. 

To mitigate the dangerous cost of downtime, many businesses are upgrading to cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) systems such as Star2Star Communications. The cloud protects a business’ voice during any disaster – from natural disasters to human errors – giving companies the reliability, resiliency and redundancy they need.

With Star2Star’s UC phone system you never have to worry about downtime. From a 99.999 percent reliability guarantee to disaster recovery services, your emergency plan is always in place. If you experience an outage at your business, Star2Star’s innovative disaster recovery system - StarRecovery – will immediately detect the problem and: 

• Calls will be rerouted to designated employee cell phones, landlines or another office location 
• Main or departmental numbers will be routed to an auto attendant or to a group of numbers

• Unlimited voice mail 
• Email delivery of voicemail 
• Customized call routing