Business Continuity has a shorter window. It is a plan for business or process resumption in smaller events such as a carrier outage, power outage, or non-emergency weather event and generally requires an immediate or near-time resumption of business.

Disaster Recovery is the process of re-establishing operations (IT or otherwise) of a business in the event of a disaster. A disaster could be a fire, terrorist event, or weather emergency – or any event that prevents normal resumption of business for a period of time. As such, disaster recovery generally indicates resumption of business over time - a few days or longer.

Regardless of the specific plan, it is safe to say that in the wake of terrorist attacks, multiple wars, and significant weather emergencies, along with increased governmental compliance scrutiny, businesses are more concerned today than ever before about Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

How can you remain productive when disaster strikes?

Most businesses have a simple DR plan that involves sending backups to an off-site facility or using an online service to backup data. While this plan ensures the business will not lose its data assets, it does not detail exactly how that data will be used in the event that the server on which it was originally located is destroyed. Nor does it account for how users will continue to communicate with the server, each other, customers, and vendors if a location is unreachable.

By cloudsouring your critical systems to Evolve IP, your business will utilize the resources, servers and software in our world class Technology Centers, virtually eliminating any concern that a disaster, or even a simple outage, will affect services at your site.

By moving your applications and infrastructure to Evolve IP’s private cloud, you can ensure that your applications are available from any location regardless of what’s happening at your office.

Evolve IP Logical Network Diagram
(click for a larger view)

What about communications?

While many businesses have some form of DR plan for their data operations, most do have not have any plan for the continued operation of their voice services in the event of a disaster. Since most phone systems reside at the customer location, an on‐site disaster or simple outage effectively disconnects that location from the rest of the world. Customers and vendors calling that location are met, unceremoniously, with a “fast busy” signal.

When your office is offline, The Evolved Office: HPBX answers inbound calls, forwards to voicemail, or automatically reroutes calls to cell phones. If a location is unavailable for a period of time, employees can simply take their phone home or use a soft client to remain productive and available at their extension without your customers knowing they’re “homesourcing.”