I woke up, went to the office, and immediately noticed something strange: nobody else had made it in. I am usually the last person to show up.

I made coffee, signed in to my computer, and started reading email. The newest message was from around seven the night before. It was now 8:30 in the morning.

The phones were silent.

On an eerie whim, I called our main business number from my mobile phone. Busy signal. That was especially disturbing because we were expecting a flood of new customers that day.

The closet was a crime scene

I walked down the hall and opened the closet that housed our very expensive PBX. It was in shambles. Wires were torn loose. Circuit boards were scattered around. Some of the cables looked as though they had been gnawed on.

Like many businesses at the time, every desk phone depended on that one box. We had paid too much for it, it was difficult to change, and now it was doing an excellent impression of modern art.

No PBX meant no calls. No backup. No graceful recovery. Just silence.

Zombies!

I returned to my desk, relieved to see that a few coworkers had finally arrived.

“Did you hear?” one of them asked.

“Hear what?” I replied, only half interested.

She continued rattling on about zombies taking over the world while I remained fiercely focused on the more immediate emergency: our company could not receive phone calls.

It had finally happened. Zombies. I always knew it would. But life goes on, business goes on, and we were losing money by the minute.

The problem was not really the zombies

The real problem was that one vulnerable piece of equipment controlled the entire business phone system. Hardware failure, power trouble, water, construction accidents, and badly placed cups of coffee are more likely than an undead invasion, but the result can be just as quiet.

A modern cloud phone system does not make outages impossible. Nothing does. It separates the system from one closet and gives calls more places to go.

If an office connection fails, cloud-based greetings, routing, and voicemail can continue operating. Calls can follow a planned path to another location, a mobile connection, or another device. The important phrase is “planned path.” Resilience works best when it is configured before somebody starts eating the wiring.

Plan for the ridiculous

  • What happens to incoming calls if your office loses internet or power?
  • Can calls move automatically to another location or device?
  • Can administrators make changes when they are away from the office?
  • Does voicemail keep answering when local equipment is unavailable?
  • Does somebody knowledgeable answer when your backup plan needs a backup plan?

Back in the story, we needed something the zombies could not reach. Something without one obvious point of failure. Something in the cloud, perhaps.

Also something reasonably priced. With most of the human race now transformed into flesh-eating customers who probably did not need our products, cash flow was becoming a concern.

Fortunately, we found RocketVox.