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Preventing Winter Business Closures on the East Coast

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Preventing Winter Business Closures on the East Coast

Blizzards shut down East Coast and cost Businesses MillionsA classic Nor’easter blizzard by the name of Jonas certainly did a number on the East Coast over the weekend. The massive storm system blanketed millions of people and businesses with more than record snowfalls as storm surges and gale-force winds also wrecked havoc up and down the Atlantic states. While many city governors are applauding citizens for heeding the many emergency warnings, many more are still urging people to stay off of the roads while crews work to clear the record-setting snowfall. While many millions of school children are enjoying snowdays, however, millions more businesses need to scramble to account for the missing revenue of these off days.

“This is worse than Sandy.”

Those were the words of Keith Laudeman, a small business owner in Cape May, New Jersey, who compared Jonas to the 2012 Superstorm Sandy. Laudeman has been preparing for or battling off the flooding caused from Jonas since the previous Wednesday and will spend upwards of two more weeks with repairs from the flood before he can reopen. The potential for three weeks off from studies due to a snow storm would be music to most schoolchildren’s ears, but to a small business owner in a vacation town who is already in the slowest part of his year to miss out on crucial revenue the news can be catastrophic. Millions of homes and businesses that were left powerless in the wake of Sandy, and the cost of those outages reached well into the billions. Even if you weren’t in a coastal town that had flooding to content with in addition to the record-setting snowfall, every day of inactivity costs your business dearly.

Don’t Just Up and Quit Your Job One Day

Or do, we’re not here to judge. The point is that you wouldn’t leave your stable gig without something to replace it with already lined-up, would you? No, of course not. That’s just as inadvisable as leaving your entire business unprotected against outages. As scary as it is to think about having your entire business continuity rely not effort, but rather to dangle precariously in the balance whenever there is the slightest disruption, there are far too many businesses that do. IT downtime alone costs businesses over $26 billion a year, so to combine those costs with repairs from a massive storm plus the compounded issues of lost revenue and customers, the narrow margins for error when it comes to failover systems for your business only tighten further.

It really is easy, though, to keep up and running. With a reliable telephone failover system as part of a business continuity plan, any business can operate with impunity in the face of the increasingly unpredictable weather. We don’t suggest you go out storm-chasing or anything, but you won’t have to bat an eye if your building loses power or gets snowed-in because emergency failover systems mirror your existing phone system and host a carbon copy back up of it in the cloud. Alternatively, you could anticipate that a storm is coming and, much like Jonas hit over the weekend, just plan for your team to stay home and then activate the communications back-up on Monday morning while everyone works safely from the comfort of their own home.

There are even more benefits to having a hosted emergency failover system preside over your business including keeping your team safe and informed during emergencies and keeping your customers informed with automated messages. You can learn more about how to benefit from the flexibility and low barriers to entry into the world of hosted telephone communications by arranging for a free personal tour of a VirtualPBX cloud-based service and seeing how to maximize your business’ potential, no matter what the weather looks like.

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