Five Nines Uptime Important When Selecting A Cloud Telephone Service Provider

Five Nines Uptime Important When Selecting A Cloud Telephone Service Provider

Near-perfection is now the norm. Your business likely relies heavily on your telecommunications systems to stay connected and productive. That’s why achieving the Five Nines standard is necessary when choosing a cloud telephone service provider for your company.

What Is Five Nines?

Five Nines is a term that refers to network availability. For decades, the holy grail of network service uptime has been 99.999%. That means about 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.

It’s important for any organization to have a network that is nearly constantly providing connectivity. Not only is it important for employees to access data, send and receive email, and communicate, it’s also important for customers and partners to be able to access websites, customer service functions and shared information.

Given how globally connected most businesses are today, high availability rates is imperative.

What Role Does Five Nines Play in Choosing a Cloud Telephone Service Provider?

Consider the importance of telecommunication to your business. In addition to desk phones, your employees are connecting to your networks via multiple devices. You rely on video conferencing and conference calls to get work done and drive new business.

Telecommunications is at the heart of how work is done. Business success is predicated on the connections among employees, locations, customers and partners. Businesses with multiple locations or employees who are frequently on the road need reliability even more. Small- and medium-sized businesses are more reliant on every sale.

What Are the Consequences of Lost Availability?

First, let’s consider what can affect the availability of your phone system.

There are natural disasters, such as floods, fires, earthquakes, tornados and snowstorms that can knock out power and prevent access to facilities, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Hackers increasingly target small businesses with attacks, either to hold sites and systems hostage (a ransomware attack), overwhelm websites (a distributed denial-of-service assault) or hack into systems to steal and sell data.

Finally, there are infrastructure failures, such as the loss of power or a widespread internet outage.

In every case, your business phone system could be compromised unless you select the right cloud telephone service provider.

What Should We Look for in a Cloud Telephone Service Provider?

To ensure that your business phone services are available when you need them, look for cloud phone services that offer the following:

• No single point of failure. Your cloud phone provider should offer service continuity that is not dependent on anyone location, connection, device or platform.
• Network resilience. Different network operators should be used to protect against an outage and disruption from a breakdown at one location.
• Geographic diversity. Your service should be delivered from different locations, ideally in data centers located at least 30 miles apart and with diverse core network nodes.
• Service level agreement. You should insist that your cloud telephone service provider offer a service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees 99.999% uptime. The agreement should include financial guarantees if SLA provisions are not met.

ICS provides business telephony and unified communications solutions that provide reliable solutions that deliver Five Nines uptime. Learn more about how to give your business the phone system with advanced features and excellent service in and out of the office. To learn more, contact ICS today.