Disruptive Telephony

I just realized that I never wrote here that an article I wrote recently came out online.  Published in Mitel's "Presence" magazine, it's titled "Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity".  Okay, so the title's not overly catchy, but here's the first paragraph:

If a hurricane devastated your main office, how rapidly could you restore telephone connectivity? If a branch office had a fire or other disaster, how soon could you connect back into the main office? Or if Avian flu or some other pandemic created a situation where you needed to stay out of the office, could you access remote phone capabilities equal to that at the office? How long would it take your business to recover? How much (and how many customers) could you afford to lose in the process?

I go on to talk about why IP communications/IP telephony/VoIP fundamentally changes the traditional way you might address these issues and offers tremendous benefits.  In fact, to me, the ability to put an IP phone pretty much anywhere you can get an IP address remains one of the major - if not the single biggest - disruptive aspect of IP telephony/communications.  Remove geography as an issue and suddenly things like disaster recover and business continuity take on a whole different view.

While it's in a Mitel publication, there's nothing in the article that is really Mitel-specific.  Listeners to Blue Box or readers of Voice of VOIPSA probably won't find it terribly new since I've been talking about this before in those sites... but for those of you not familiar with DR and BCP and how VoIP can change that, I think you'll find it a useful read.