TerraSIP Migration for Business Continuity

When it comes to communication systems, nothing is more crucial to a business than the phones. Even a few hours worth of interruption can make a huge difference to the bottom line for a company. This is why customer service and technical support is the hallmark of a good vendor in the VoIP industry. When something goes wrong with your phones, you need to be able to depend on your vendor to get it back up and working without any losses to your business.

TerraSIP Closes Doors

There is no service out there – whether in the VoIP industry or some other segment – that is perfect or has 100% availability/uptime. Every vendor will have hiccups, technical problems, software bugs or hardware failures every now and then. Clients are generally compensated under the terms of the service level agreement while the provider works to get the service working again.

But what do you do when your vendor goes out of business and shuts down altogether? This is the situation that clients of TerraSIP, a UK-based VoIP provider are facing today. Organizations that have business continuity plans in place will quickly move forward while others will flounder. Unfortunately developing a BCP (Business Continuity Plan) is not exactly at the top of the priority list for enterprises, until something goes wrong. But by then it is far too late.

Why is Business Continuity so Important?

Business continuity is one of those things that we may look at as a tedious, time-consuming process that doesn’t have much reward. Enterprises may feel that compared to the amount we need to invest in ensuring business continuity, the return is very less since the probability of a disaster is quite low. The mistake we often make is that we consider interruptions only in the context of natural disasters or other emergencies.

However, business continuity is more than just emergency response or disaster management. For example, the individual probability of a fire or flood happening at your office may be very low. But there are plenty of other things that can go wrong such as the lights going out unexpectedly, the Internet connection developing problems, a critical hardware failure and so on.

Most businesses are typically concerned with two things:

• The day to day workflows or processes – we try to make them as efficient as possible in terms of time and cost
• Huge disasters or other emergencies – the business usually has a checklist of things such as fire exits, phone numbers to call etc.

Very few enterprises have proper business continuity plans in place for the numerous things that can go wrong in a typical year. How long you can afford to shut down your business to take care of the problem will depend on many variables such as the size of the business, competitiveness of the market, how critical your service is for clients and so on. So a small fashion boutique may be able to shut down for the entire day without customers feeling the pinch but the same cannot be said for an organization that provides Internet connections.

What’s Next for TerraSIP Clients?

The average consumer may be able to sit back and take his time when deciding on a new vendor but enterprises – those who don’t have a BCP – do not have that luxury. Switching to another provider as quickly as possible is the need of the hour. However, that doesn’t mean you should simply pick a vendor at random. Can you be sure that the service will be reliable in the future? Can this vendor get your phones back online fast? The answers to questions will be a crucial element determining the future of the business.

GoTrunk is a good option for customers of TerraSIP to consider. Hosted phone service from GoTrunk is based on the SIP protocol which means that there will be no software incompatibilities or interoperability problems. There is no need for you to purchase new hardware as your existing infrastructure will work quite well with VoIP studio.

Another huge advantage for migrating clients is the ease and speed of setup. When your aim is to get the phones back up as soon as possible, GoTrunk is the best choice. Sometimes new clients may need to update their infrastructure or business network in order to work with VoIP. Since your company is already familiar with SIP, the phones can be functioning again within the hour.

GoTrunk has multiple data centers around the world to ensure that your business does not have to worry about disaster striking again. We will make sure that any problems at our end will not affect your phone service. An integral part about having business continuity plans is to ensure that your various vendors also have a BCP and you can rest assured that GoTrunk has one. Switching vendors – regardless of the reason – should never be an obstacle for organizations looking to get the best possible phone service for their needs.