The Importance of Redundancy in your VOIP Phone System
Posted on Wed, Feb 23, 2011 @ 03:20 PM
Whether it’s between remote colleagues within an organization or with clients located around the world—in today’s global economy, every business knows the importance of having clear communication.
The success of your business communications is heavily contingent upon the reliability of your network transmitting these communications. And this is no small matter. After all, poor reliability of your network can create downtime that can cost companies money and not to mention the lost opportunities that are never realized as a result of network downtime.
Because a reliable network is crucial to all businesses, the industry has created best practices to help companies evaluate the performance of the plethora of VOIP phone systems on the market.
One term that describes maintaining uptime is five nines—this refers to the 99.999% uptime—this is considered the highest uptime that can be offered. There is a small percentage of downtime, which is allocated to scheduled maintenance during times that have the least impact on your company—off-hours, weekends, holidays, etc.
Redundancy is another concept that is important for businesses to understand when evaluating VOIP solutions.
To illustrate the meaning of redundancy, imagine for example, you’re taking a road trip to a friend’s house and during the trip, the planned route is obstructed by a tree in the middle of the road. This planned route is no longer accessible, but lucky for you, there are several other routes that will allow you to make it to your destination without losing any time. This is redundancy.
Redundancy as it relates to your VOIP network refers to having alternative routes for your data in the event the main access point fails, thus ensuring that your business’ network has the aforementioned five nines.
Not all VOIP providers adhere to the five nines standard, but one VOIP provider that does is ShoreTel. Xtelesis clients know when we implement their VOIP solutions, they don’t have to wonder, because we proudly provide ShoreTel solutions, which adhere to the industry’s best practices and offer the five nines to ensure network reliability and optimal uptime.
To see what makes ShoreTel special, watch part one and part two of our ShoreTel architecture videos.
To learn more about VOIP best practices, download ShoreTel’s whitepaper now!