The month of December brings with it the official end of the hurricane season and the beginning of an equally formidable threat, Old Man Winter. That’s because natural disasters can test even the strongest business continuity plans. Power outages can shut down an entire data center, flooding can compromise copper lines and strong winds can knock out wireless towers.

Just look at last year’s record-breaking winter or, going back a few years, to Hurricane Sandy. 74% of businesses affected by Sandy were closed for at least one full day. Another 44% of those businesses stayed closed for over a week. Imagine not being able to send or receive calls from customers for an entire week. Could your business survive an extended outage like that?

Ironically, the safest place to be in a storm is the cloud. Moving IT and communications into a geo-redundant cloud provides a safe haven against natural disasters. So long as your employees have an Internet connection, they can continue to access their unified communications (UC) – phone, email, IM, videoconferencing, collaborative apps – from home, even if your office is literally underwater.

Learn more about Mitel’s Cloud solutions. Contact us today: (800) 787-4848 or jnolte@ctsmd.us.