Snow Day Plans

How did your Snow Day plans work last year?  Disaster recovery is something every business owner knows they should take seriously but when the time comes to put your plan into effect how it works in practice is often not what you envisaged.

Our head office in Exeter was in the middle of one of only two “red warning” areas issued by the Met Office on 1^st and 2^nd March 2018, the other being as you would expect in the North half of Scotland.  Our plan in extreme situations is to send our staff home to work, and this is really easy to achieve with our Cobalt Cloud Telephone System.

Knowing that these two days were going to be unpredictable, we unplugged our desk phones on Wednesday night, drove home and plugged them into our home broadband connections.  This meant that our staff were able to answer calls from our customers as if they were in the office – our office lines simply moved with our staff!  By making use of our terminal server, we could also access all of the programs, files and folders from our work computers.  We could all work just as efficiently as we could in the office.

It was a win, win for everyone!

1. We still serviced all of our customers; those who braved the weather and managed to make it into their office.
2. Our team didn’t have to potentially lose a days’ wages through not being able to work.
3. Nobody put themselves at risk by attempting a treacherous journey into the office, or worry about how they would make it home.

So despite the weather, our Cobalt Cloud voice and data solutions worked perfectly for us. Our servers are hosted across 13 data centres in the UK and Western Europe which means we have a totally resilient service that will always be accessible; whatever the weather.

As a result, we may be one of the few local businesses that managed to continue to be 100% manned and 100% efficient throughout the last two days of unusual weather.

However, we would have been just as effective in the case of failure of power or any other natural disaster, (even broadband outages as we can also fall back to the mobile networks).

When was the last time you reviewed your disaster recovery plan?

Contact us, and we can help you put our resilient solutions in place, so you are ready for anything.