Once upon a time, landlines were actually physical lines that ran on land. And while we consumers are rapidly switching to mobile in our homes, businesses of any size have remained tethered to this venerable nineteenth-century technology.
No longer. As with so many aspects of our business lives, the cloud has changed everything.
At no time is this difference between present and past starker than when disaster strikes. In the past, if a hurricane shut down a business, employees would simply have to take the week off.
How times have changed. When Hurricane Florence recently approached the Eastern Seaboard, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) provider RingCentral sprang into action. “Everything has been set up to fail over to one or more data centers,” said Ashu Varshney, VP, Cloud Technology & Security Operations for RingCentral. “When hurricane Florence approached, we migrated customers from our data center in Ashburn, Virginia to the one in San Jose, California.”
More Communication, not Less, During Times of Disruption
Where before, companies’ fixed landlines at best supported limited call forwarding capabilities, RingCentral’s UCaaS gives its customers all the flexibility of a software-based communications solution in the cloud.
How businesses handle disasters, therefore, has radically transformed. “In the old, on-premises way of doing things, if the business was in the path of a storm, the company would have little need for office communications because employees would be scattered all over,” explained Curtis Peterson, SVP Operations for RingCentral. “A few years ago, before the mass adoption of cloud strategy, communication was the last to move off-site.”
Instead, RingCentral’s customers enjoy an entirely different experience. “Today, a hurricane increases the need for our platform instead of decreasing it, since there’s a greater need for communication,” Peterson said. “When you get scattered from your building, these services can be critical for maintaining your business.”
Furthermore, maintaining a business during such a disruption means more than simply transferring phone lines, as videoconferencing and other communications services can be especially important for maintaining continuity when employees are unable to come into the office.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2018/10/22/hurricane-florence-vs-the-cloud-guess-who-won/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, ThousandEyes is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Orin Zebest.
