Since 9/11 the IT industry has been buzzing with the term Disaster Recovery. While the concept has been around for many years, Disaster Recovery has a different connotation nowadays. As business technology and software applications have advanced, Disaster Recovery has come to mean more than simply the ability to get your systems back online after a power outage.
Today effective disaster and business continuity planning firms like CoSentry look at every possible impact on a clients business, from stock losses, supply chain issues, loss of reputation, impaired transport and communication links to damaged customer relationships.
Disaster Recovery Video
Darian Davis: Outside of legislation that comes down from state and federal governments that ultimately affect the ARM industry because of their customers, as well as the consumer data that they're housing, other issues may come up with regard to IT infrastructure. And that can be anything from a plumbing issue that affects their data center or data closet, whatever that is, as well as fire, acts of nature, anything like that. But most often, what we try to mitigate against are man-made issues, and that tends to come down to connectivity, a server failing, something like that. So, where CoSentry can really be of value is to help those companies mitigate against those sorts of disasters. And truly, they are disasters, because if their workforce can't work, then they can't make any money.
Call centers are very, very reliant upon their people being on the phones and making those phone calls. So in that kind of situation where a dialer may be involved, a dialer is simply a server; it's just a different kind of computer setup or infrastructure that's required. And sometimes, those dialer systems exist over a voice over IP system. All of those are very, very reliant upon technology. So by having an active site with CoSentry, so everything is backed up, running 100% all at the same time, [if] one site fails, you can automatically fail over to us.
This was brought up today with an existing customer of mine who's considering using us for voice over IP. And what they're considering doing with us is having another voice over IP solution within our data center. They already have an alternate dialer there and all they would do is have many of their calls, or split their calls, between the two centers. And during this outage that we had today, he called me and said, “Look, if you could tell me I'd be up and running right now with CoSentry, because I'd have a redundant solution there, then I'm sold on this technology. I'm sold on this solution.” And because the carrier that we were providing isn't different than the one he uses today – so again, fully redundant solution – we would have been able to help him, should that issue have occurred and he already had that solution in place.