With yesterday’s rather huge power outage in the East Bay, we are all reminded on how vulnerable we all are to disruptions in services we normally take for granted. Apparently, 45,000 customers were offline due to the sacrifice of a poor squirrel, according to the Berkeleyside web site. As far as disasters go, we got off pretty easy.
Fortunately, one’s business doesn’t have to stop nowadays because the power is out in your office. With various cloud services one can simply grab a laptop, find somewhere with a working WiFi hotspot, and you’re back in business.
45,000 PG&E customers were offline on April 25, 2016 for about 3 hours
Move To The Cloud
At Telnexus, we don’t have any operational services running out of our office. We are 100% cloud-based for all of our business services. Here’s our run-down of cloud-based services that kept us running yesterday:
- Telnexus Cloud PBX – All we had to do was log onto our telephony cloud, and we forwarded numbers to our cell phones, or we already had access on our mobile devices using a softphone.
- Google Apps for Work – We don’t run our own email service, so we get to rely on Google’s virtually indestructible cloud service. If we were Outlook fans, then Microsoft Office 365 would have done the same job. Both services host one’s business documents in the cloud with Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
- Salesforce – All of our sales, quoting, ordering and billing systems run on Salesforce. Their software runs as a service in the Salesforce data centers. No on-site software is needed to use their Software as a Service (SaaS).
- Xero – We recently got the last piece of our puzzle moved the cloud. We used to have a Quickbooks server in the office, but we moved to Xero accounting, which is a SaaS product that we like a whole lot better than Quickbooks.
We still have a computer network in the office with Windows servers that host large file shares that are too big to have in the cloud. But, that’s really it. We run all of our software development in hosted services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, or we have our own servers hosted somewhere running VMware.
Power outage hits downtown and north Berkeley, credit Berkeleyside Oct. 1, 2012
Remove Some Of The Stress from Disasters
Dealing with a power outage, weather emergency or another disaster shouldn’t keep you from staying in touch with your clients. And, you don’t need your business data locked up in a “data jail” if your office is offline.
Get better prepared for the next disaster today. To help migrate your voice and data services to the cloud, give Telnexus a call at +1-510-859-7000 or drop us an email at info@telnexus.com. We will give you a free assessment of how migrating your business to the cloud would benefit your operations, especially when it comes to disaster preparedness and recovery.
