Infotech Lead America: Hurricane Sandy has assisted 8×8 to sign more enterprises who are looking for turning to cloud-based communications services for continuity and disaster recovery.
ICS Software, a family owned business based in Oceanside, New York, tapped 8×8 for Virtual Office cloud based phone service so that employees who hadn’t lost power or Internet could communicate with customers from their homes.
“We decided to sign up with 8×8’s business phone service so that our employees could immediately begin working from home using soft phones. This capability will serve us well not just in this crisis but beyond, as we’ll not only be able to quickly recover from future business disruptions, we’ll also have a lot more features and flexibility than we had with our previous phone system,” said Ken Katz, president of ICS.
8×8’s Virtual Office cloud communications services are delivered from two redundant and geographically diverse data centers located on the East and West Coasts.
Should one of these data centers go offline, 8×8’s technology allows the entire call flow processing to be moved to the other data center in less than 30 seconds. All PBX services, configurations, functions and data, such as voicemails, are fully mirrored between the data centers, allowing complete functionality in the event of a disaster impacting either one of them. Each data center is capable of handling 8×8’s entire customer load.
Water Quality Insurance Syndicate (WQIS), an underwriter of pollution liability insurance for marine vessels in the United States, will be installing 8×8 Virtual Office business phone and fax services.
“Hurricane Sandy has opened our eyes to the vulnerability and limitations of the premises-based communications system we currently had in place. Had we been using 8×8 service previously, we would not have been tied to one physical location. Our employees would have been able to simply plug their desk phone into their home Internet connection or use a PC soft phone to conduct business just as if they were in the office,” said WQIS IT Director John Imor.
Rockville, Maryland-based Preferred Computing Resources (PCR Educator), decided to get rid of the PBX phone system and move to a 100 percent web-based telephony environment.
“With the threat of Sandy upon us, we didn’t want our business to suffer as a result of storm damage that could disable our PBX equipment. We are now not tied to any one device with our 8×8 service, not even desk phones, as we are all using PCs and iPhones for our business communications. We’ve also been able to add valuable features, like after hours emergency ring groups, to improve customer responsiveness,” said PCR Educator) CEO Tom deBettencourt.
