Assuring Business Communications Continuity An ebrief about Wireless Business Continuity
When your business communications network is down, or when weather or other disasters keep your employees from getting to the office, you're losing money with every minute. That is why more and more companies are recognizing how critical business continuity keeping the operations going in the face of outages is to their success. An AT&T survey found that six out of seven 83 percent of companies see business continuity as a priority, and that 67 percent of companies have included wireless network capabilities as part of their continuity plans. With that level of awareness, it isn't a question of whether to invest in communications continuity, but what way is the best. While being able to maintain communications is critical, it is not the only consideration. There are costs associated with any emergency communications backup plan. The ideal approach for any company is to have in place a fallback communications option that will assure continuity, but do it as cost-effectively as possible. Because any backup plan will be costing you money even during the 99 percent or more of the time when you don't need it when the network and operations are up you want to get the best option for the best value. That is the purpose of this ebriefing, to compare the costs and effectiveness of traditional methods of assuring communications continuity with a newer, mobile phone-based approach. What Can Go Wrong? The first thing that comes to mind when people think about business disruption is an IT outage, some technical glitch that takes down the ability to communicate. That is far from the only potential Disruptors The top seven business-disrupting issues, according to a survey conducted by the Business Continuity Institute in 2014: IT outages Power outages Weather-related incidents Travel disruption Security-related issues Facilities management incidents Natural disasters problem. An AT&T survey found that six out of seven 83 percent of companies see business continuity as a priority, and that 67 percent of companies have included wireless network capabilities as part of their continuity plans. The power might go out at a facility or remote site, with an outage lasting longer than the backup power that is in place. Weather problems and natural disasters, from blizzards to hurricanes to floods to earthquakes to fires, can shut down sites or make it impossible for employees to get to work. There may be criminal or other security incidents that force a site to close temporarily. Whatever the cause, your company needs to be prepared, to keep your communications up and make sure your employees can continue to talk and text with customers, vendors, and each other. Traditional Business Continuity The traditional method of ensuring business continuity for communications is to purchase redundant equipment for each company site, as backup in case of network problems, and lease redundant circuits from the telephone company, to assure connectivity.
This involves the purchase of remote survivable gateways to make sure the site can remain connected to the main PBX or call handling system. During normal operations, when the network is fully available, on-net calls between colleagues are routed via the centralized PBX, offering the full set of PBX features. Other inbound or outbound calls that use the phone network are handled through the gateway during normal operations. The Cost of Redundant Circuits Survivable remote gateways can cost up to $4,000 each and leased backup circuits from the phone company can cost up to $450 each per month. When there is a network outage, the gateway becomes the lifeline, and the redundant telephone circuits are pressed into use. This approach has worked successfully for companies for years, but it is a costly option. Purchasing survivable remote gateways can cost up to $4,000 each, and at one for each site, a multi-site company can incur a significant equipment investment. Similarly, leased backup circuits from the phone company can cost up to $450 each per month, and again, these need to be in place for each corporate site. There are some situations, however, that the traditional approach cannot overcome. If a key telephone company cable is cut by a backhoe, for instance, that will preclude calls made over the phone network, unless the local carrier has an alternate way to move those calls around the problem. Also, if the problem is within the facility or is weather related such that the worker can't get to his or her desk phone, or can't even get to work the backup equipment can't be accessed. While circumstances such as these aren't common, they do occur, and a company needs to evaluate these kinds of possibilities when planning for business communications continuity. A New Continuity Approach The new approach to business communications continuity is mobile-centric. It leverages the mobile phones of employees whether those phones are employee-owned in a Bring Your Own Device environment or company-provided. By adding a software application to each of those mobile phones, it would enable those phones to become backup communications devices within seconds of an outage that takes down the network or any event that gets in the way of communications. Such an application, provided via a small monthly fee per phone, offers a solution free of the need to buy backup equipment or lease backup circuits. The application would enable a dual identity on the phone, so that it presents two personas: business and personal. The business identity would present the employee's usual dial-in office phone number, and any calls made to or from that number would appear as business calls. By separating the business side of the phone from the personal side, it maintains privacy for the employee while presenting a business "brand" to customers, vendors, and others. This segmentation would also allow the company to track all calls made via the business identity, in order to properly reimburse the employees if necessary.
Determining the Cost of Downtime You will see all kinds of estimates of the cost of downtime for an "average" company. There are so many factors involved that these estimates mean very little to you. Let's look at some calculations you can do to determine how downtime affects you. Assessing the personnel costs and lost revenue connected with network downtime for your company is fairly straightforward. What is more difficult to measure is the damage to your business due to customer dissatisfaction or bruised loyalty. But first, let's look at the easily measurable costs. To determine the personnel cost, you can use a simple equation, with W representing the number of workers affected, C the average hourly cost (pay plus benefits) of the employees to your company, D the number of hours of downtime, and P the average percentage that the employees are affected. The equation is W x C x D x P = your cost. For example, if 50 employees are affected, at an average hourly cost of $28 per employee, for six hours, with their jobs affected at about 70 percent, the cost is calculated as 50 x 28 x 6 x.7 = $5,880. You can determine potential revenue losses with a similar equation. Here AR represents a company's annual gross revenue, while TH equals the total number of hours the business operates per year. PI is the percentage of impact, with 100 percent representing a total inability to earn revenue. Finally, D is the number of hours of downtime. The equation is then (AR/ TH) x PI x D. For a company with $18 million in annual revenue, with 2,600 hours of annual operations (based on 10- hour weekdays), affected at 70 percent for six hours, the cost is calculated at $6,923 per hour ($18 million/2600 hours) x.7 x 6 = $29,076. In this scenario, the total cost of six hours of downtime for this company would be $34,956. As you can see, it doesn't take too much downtime to do real damage to a company's bottom line, and that doesn't even measure the harm done to the company's reputation and customer loyalty. Enhancing the value of such a solution would be the ability to send texts as well, again presenting the business identity for all communications. There are distinct advantages to a mobilecentric approach. First, it uses the dependable public wireless network as the redundant path back to the data center and corporate network, eliminating the need for the company to pay for some form of redundancy. Also, it helps enable a company to move all of its phone circuits to a central data center via SIP Trunking for long-term cost savings through trunk consolidation. It also gives employees the option of using their mobile phones for work purposes while away from the office during non-outage times, helping to increase their productivity. The Tango Networks Wireless Solution Tango Networks wireless business continuity eliminates the need for redundant hardware or phone lines to keep a company's communications operating in the event WAN or PBX connectivity is lost. It allows you to stay fully connected to customers, vendors, co-workers, and others. All that is needed is a mobile phone and Tango Networks' unique software solution to assure communications in any circumstance and to enjoy potential cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars a year, depending on the number of company sites. With just a mobile phone and the Tango Networks wireless business continuity solution, if your network goes down, your employees can shift over to the continuity solution in seconds and keep on taking and making business voice calls using their mobile phones. It is a solution that provides a dependable fallback strategy for any size company, and anywhere employees have access to cellular or WiFi coverage during an outage.
Even if the employees' mobile phones are their personal ones, the Tango Networks Wireless Business Continuity solution can provide them a second identity a business identity on their phone. The calls will all appear as business calls and can be logged for cost tracking and reimbursement purposes. Wireless Business Continuity also features a business messaging option, offering more communication capabilities. Cost Comparison: Traditional vs. Tango Networks To compare the costs of a traditional continuity solution to Tango Networks Wireless Business Continuity, let's look at a company with 10 remote sites, each with 10 employees. The traditional approach requires a one-time purchase of a survivable remote gateway, which can cost $1,000 to $4,000. It also requires a backup telephone company circuit, at about $450 per month. Gateway and IT support costs add about $200 monthly. Over the course of a year, this 10-remote-site company will spend about $118,000 in business continuity costs. With Tango Wireless Business Continuity this company could save 80-85% of those costs over a single year. Small Business Solution The needs of small businesses for business communications continuity are different, since they generally operate from a single site. Also, their redundancy options are limited. They can either secure a redundant phone company circuit, or arrange call forwarding to a mobile number in an outage. The redundant circuit should ideally be offered through a separate phone company, to assure true redundancy, but this will only add to the cost. The downside of forwarding calls to a mobile number is that any benefits of a company phone system are lost, such as company voice mail. For small businesses, Tango Networks offers a hosted voice and messaging platform, which can be used as a backup to the existing phone system or can entirely replace its phone system. Conclusion It takes very little time for a communications outage to wreak havoc on a company of any size. Downtime can cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour in lost sales and personnel costs. Clearly, a communications continuity solution is a critical investment. But as this ebriefing has shown, the solution doesn't have to be limited to what companies have always done in backing up their communications. With Tango Networks Wireless Business Continuity, the solution is a practical and cost-effective one. Your company may go five years or more without an outage and we hope that is the case but in the meantime, you don't need to spend nearly as much to gain peace of mind.