Keep talking — no matter how bad things get

This is the second post in a series that explores five reasons to revisit the business case for deploying IP telephony and VoIP in your organization. Read part one: 2 ways to dramatically lower VOIP TCO

Not long ago, the Internet in general and any application riding on it were regarded as less than reliable, certainly not worthy of being part of a vital enterprise infrastructure. IP telephony was a case in point.  While people had fun talking over the Internet, they were doing so fully aware that they should not be fussy about voice quality and should not have a great deal of faith on whether the whole thing is going to work every time.

Not anymore.  Over the last couple of years, due to steady advances in technology, capacity and business models, the Internet has grown considerably more resilient.  So much more so that now, in a world constantly visited by natural disasters, terrorist attacks and administrative mishaps, the Internet has become, in many instances, the preferred vehicle for implementing Business Continuity strategies and protecting enterprises from outages and disruptions

Why so? Not only is the Internet more resilient but its naturally decentralized structure, the ability to converge several types of communications on the same pipe and the lack of multiple common points of failure gives the Internet an advantage over traditional hierarchical back up technologies.

Enterprises concerned about continuity of voice or multi-media communications are best served by IP telephony services relying on the Internet for connectivity to the outside world. By judiciously distributing servers among geographically diverse locations and by subscribing to SIP Trunking from one or more telecom providers, organizations can protect themselves effectively against outages and disruption. And of course, the protection is so much stronger if the access to the Internet is through an MPLS based WAN service that prioritizes traffic and offers an intrinsic self-healing mesh topology.

The benefits of an Internet based communication infrastructure go beyond Business Continuity. The same attributes that recommend such an infrastructure for disaster recovery, also make it ideal for quickly deploying new applications, updating network configurations or changing the number of users without delay or complexity.

A new look at IP telephony thus reveals another one of its strength; in addition to delivering big savings, it naturally makes enterprises more agile and resilient, more ready to face adversity or change.

For more in-depth insights, read the Gartner Inc. report, “The Business Case for IP Telephony Revisited: Five Reasons Why the Time to Evolve Is Now featured on our resources page.