For most businesses, a key component of any small business disaster recovery plan is ensuring that your phones continue to be answered in the event a snowstorm, fire, flood or other disaster prevents your business from operating in its usual place and manner. 

Often, this involves working out complex routing arrangements to redirect calls from your business phone system to alternate numbers such as employees’ homes and cell phones. These alternate routing schemes can require outside support to configure and test to ensure proper operation – not so with a hosted PABX.

A hosted PBX can help keep your communications running no matter what disaster strikes at your principal place of business, without the need for labor intensive and costly configuration work on the front end. Here are a few key ways a hosted PBX can keep your business running:

Your Hosted PBX Phone works on virtually any high speed Internet connection. If you have some warning of an impending natural disaster, your employees can pick up their phones, take them home, and plug them into their home internet connection or the network at your disaster recovery facility or branch office. In most cases, your Hosted PBX phone will work exactly like it does at their desk. (If your phone gets its power and network connection over the same cable, you will most likely need a separate power supply to use it on your home network.)
Your Hosted PBX’s auto attendant and voice mail system will continue to answer calls and take messages.Your provider’s Hosted PBX switch is located in a data center equipped with electronics-safe fire suppression systems, backup power systems, diverse Internet connections and a variety of other protections to ensure continuous operation. As a result, the core of your phone system will most likely remain online no matter what is happening around you. This means that no matter what, calls will be answered.
Calls can automatically route to cell phones. If your Hosted PBX extension is equipped with the Find-me, Follow-me or Simultaneous Ringing feature, it will keep forwarding calls to your mobile phone home phone, or whatever extension you have it set up for, regardless of what happens to the phone at the office.
Your Hosted PBX web portal puts you in control. Forward calls from your extension to any alternate phone manually by just logging in to your hosted PBX web portal from any computer or handheld device with an Internet connection and entering the phone number you want to send calls to. When the disaster is over, route calls back in the same point-and-click fashion.