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Comtact hosted comms beat BT exchange
fire
05/06/07
Comtact, a
provider of hosted telecoms and IT services, has recently been under
a surprise “test” of the business continuity benefits of it’s hosted
solutions when a BT exchange was damaged in a fire near to it’s
Midlands office in Stafford Park, Telford.
Comtacts
Midlands office is based on the popular Stafford Park in the
outskirts of Telford town centre.
At approximately 3.30am on Saturday,
19th May, a fire occurred in the local BT exchange damaging around
1000 lines and affecting 500 local businesses, including Comtact Ltd
Comtact was
alerted to the problems by it’s monitoring software, which
automatically flagged up connectivity problems to it’s head office
in London. As a BT partner, Comtact was able to ascertain quite
quickly the problems with the lines, although it was established
that, like the other businesses in Stafford Park, normal service was
unlikely to be resumed until around Wednesday the following week or
possibly even later.
This issues
affects all BT services from this exchange, including all Telephone
lines and all Data lines, meaning that businesses on the park would
not be able to e-mail, phone or fax for the better part of a week.
As Comtact “takes it’s own medicine”, all of it’s services are
hosted services. This means that all of it’s services are in secure
data centres outside of it’s office and are therefore not affected
by local “disasters” such as this. Simply put, Comtact was able to
divert all of it’s DDI numbers to alternative numbers. The main
telephone number was diverted to it’s head office, while Direct Dial
Numbers were diverted to individuals mobile phones or to “softphones”,
which are software phones that have the same features as your office
phone, but can be run on any PC or Laptop.
In addition to
this the company’s e-mails were unaffected as all of it’s employees
were able to log onto their company IT services through their
laptops at home. Fax’s continued to be received by individuals as
e-mails in their e-mail inbox’s.
So, whilst
approximately 500 businesses continue to suffer today, for Comtact
it’s business as usual.
Managing
Director Dominic List commented “ we have been instrumental in
implementing both Hosted IT and Telecoms into many businesses and
have always been keen to point out the Business Continuity benefits
of this type of service. Like most businesses we had our disaster
recovery plans in place, but didn’t actually think that we would
ever have them tested in a true live environment. We are glad to
report back that hosted IT and Telecoms gives you time to recover
from a disaster and to continue as usual.”
Nick Gibson, editor
© Copyright Screen-Studio.com
2007
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