Institute for Business and Home Safety Reveals 25% of Businesses
Never Reopen Following a Major Disaster
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
When Hurricane
Sandy struck a year ago, many businesses were unprepared to handle
the communications outages, loss of electricity and physical destruction
she caused. Even now 83%
of businesses do not have an IT business continuity plan in place.
Businesses cannot afford lengthy downtimes when disasters strike, so
they must be ready to recover from disruptions to business continuity
immediately. Fortunately, today's cloud-based technologies enable
businesses to maintain their IT operations and communications channels
even when they can no longer work from their main corporate office.
Apart from natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, today's knowledge
workers require the capability to work from wherever they are, whenever
they are needed.
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT), provider of cloud communications and
collaboration solutions, offers technologies that enable in-house and
remote employees to continue working from any Internet-enabled location,
despite unanticipated business continuity disruptions. From cloud-based
telephony and contact center services to unified communications, 8x8
offers a comprehensive suite of services that helps businesses keep
employees powered up and working strong. Additionally, since 8x8's
services are delivered over the public Internet, a business can activate
full-featured enterprise class phone service in minutes, enabling it to
promptly resume its communications capabilities following damage or
disablement to an existing on-premise phone system.
"In this day and age, we're seeing more and more of our employees work
from home due to everyday demands, whether it be a catastrophic disaster
or because their kids are sick and cannot go to school," said John Imor,
IT Director of Water Quality Insurance Syndicate. "With 8x8, we've been
able to provide all employees, whether they typically work remotely or
not, with the proper tools to continue to do their jobs outside of the
office setting."
While catastrophic disasters like Hurricane Sandy do happen
occasionally, most system downtime occurrences are caused by human
error, unexpected updates or server room environment issues. In fact
according to a survey by Acronis
and the Ponemon Institute, 86% of companies experienced one or more
instances of system downtime in the previous year, and 60% of the time
human error was a factor.
In addition, everyday disasters, like employees' children getting sick,
urgent family situations or even travelling can get in the way of
traditional at-work procedures. A Census
Bureau report revealed 9.4% of U.S. workers—or 13.4 million
people—worked at least one day at home per week, a number that is on the
rise compared to years prior.
"Bottom line, a business continuity plan is not just for hurricane-sized
disasters," said 8x8 Sr. Vice President of Product & Strategy Darren
Hakeman. "Smaller business disruptions, like the recent BART Strike in
the San Francisco Bay Area, happen all the time. Organizations should
have a communication and collaboration solution in place with built-in
disaster recovery to handle both system downtime and
disasters-in-waiting. This will ensure their customers are served and
their business remains open."
For more information about 8x8 cloud communications and collaboration
solutions, visit http://www.8x8.com/VoIPBusinessPhoneSystems.aspx.
About 8x8, Inc.
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) offers a comprehensive portfolio of unified,
cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions that includes
hosted cloud
telephony, office communications, contact
center, video conferencing and virtual desktop software and
services. The company has been delivering business services to SMB,
mid-market and distributed enterprises since 2004 and has garnered a
reputation for technical excellence and outstanding reliability. In
2012, 8x8 was named a market "leader" in Gartner's
Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) in
North America and was recognized as the No. 1 Provider of Hosted IP
Telephony by Frost
& Sullivan and Synergy
Research Group. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com,
or connect with 8x8 on Google+,
Facebook,
LinkedIn
and Twitter.
8x8, Inc.
Tim Polakowski, 669-200-6638
tim.polakowski@8x8.com
Source: 8x8
News Provided by Acquire Media