In the first week of 2016, rain has been coming to the drought-stricken state of California. Lots and lots of rain. Between flooding on three of the Bay Area’s busiest freeways, intermittent power outages, and the classical Californian ineptitude for safely navigating wet roads, getting work done has been an adventure lately. Plus, with another week of rain right around the corner, more businesses are realizing the need for contingency plans if they expect to keep their doors open through this much-needed rainy season.
El Niño & the Terrible Twos
The onslaught on extreme weather barreling in from the Pacific Ocean is part of the El Niño effect that we have been warning you about for the past several months. Now that it has begun to hit the Californian coastline, the extreme unpredictability has begun to spread across the United States as well. Everything from massive flooding in Missouri, deadly tornadoes in Texas, and even the third coldest game ever played in NFL history this past weekend in Minnesota all mark just the beginning of what will likely be a record-setting year for dangerous and disruptive weather. Unlike pie-eating contests or consecutive free throws made, however, these types of records are not the types of benchmarks you wish to eclipse.
Beat the Weather
When El Niño is throwing a tantrum the best thing you can do is ignore it and not engage. Sure, that looks good on paper, but it isn’t as easily accomplished by a business that is trying not to encourage a rainstorm. Fortunately for you, when you have a hosted telephone system from VirtualPBX, you have the flexibility and mobility of one of the most reliable networks in the cloud. That means that if your own I-80 (or 280 or 101 or any other freeway here) is flooded over, your office park has a power outage, or you just don’t want to swim across your carport to your car, you can work from home or anywhere you can find higher ground and an internet connection. Because you’re connected to your customers through the internet, if you’re already at work when the storm hits and you lose all of your utilities, you never really go down and can take your business with you to a safe location.
You can still benefit from the same failover that VirtualPBX users enjoy even if you’re on a traditional, on-site PBX, too. By employing PBX Parachute, a hosted telephone failover system that mirrors your existing phone set-up, you too can have the confidence that comes from knowing that no matter if it’s raining cats and dogs, you’ll be able to stay busy with your customers. Whereas a hosted phone system is always online and accessed through the cloud, PBX Parachute mirrors the on-site PBX and when access to it is disrupted, it instantly deploys via the cloud and your business lines stay hot without skipping a beat.
Read more about PBX Parachute with our Data Sheet or make an appointment to take a personal tour through the benefits of unified communications through the cloud and start battening down the hatches for the next storm today!