Business continuity service provider, ICM Continuity Services, has completed the rollout of its new state-of-the-art VoIP system to 7,500 end points across its eighteen business continuity sites nationwide. The new telephony platform from Avaya will allow ICM’s 2,000 business customers to have the same highly resilient telephony service fully operational in minutes – including advanced call centre facilities – from any centre in the UK.

The multi-million pound investment in the Aura system from Avaya, a cutting edge VoIP platform, followed closely on from ICM’s major investment in RecoveryNet in 2009, a nationwide high-speed data and internet network. The aim of the project was to ensure that should a customer suffer an outage, the upgraded IP network would reduce the time for the voice and data to be reinstated and individually configured from hours to minutes.

The new centralised telephony network means that each customer’s detailed telephony configuration information including contact centre facilities like skill-based routing, voice menus, recorded announcements and management information, for instance, can be stored centrally and deployed quickly and simply at any centre in minutes rather than hours. In the event of an incident that affects a number of customers in one area, companies are not limited to relocating their staff to a specific business continuity site, but can choose instead from any of the eighteen centres. It also means that customers wishing to relocate staff in different centres are able to communicate seamlessly between multiple locations as they would within their own organisation and have the same DDI delivery number pointed to any centre.

According to Nigel Dickens, head of information security and business continuity at Cardif Pinnacle, “ICM’s state-of-the-art voice and data infrastructure is a key advantage for our insurance business, as it means that should we need to invoke our business continuity plan and move staff into ICM recovery sites, we are able to utilise whichever part of the private network has optimal capacity, which is of major importance in a serious incident when phone lines can get overloaded.”

Tony Sanders, technical and development director at ICM added, “The telephone is a vital communications tool in any business to stay in touch with customers, employees and suppliers and reassure them, particularly following a major incident. We have taken a ‘belt and braces’ approach to guaranteeing our customers the ability to have both their data and telephony services fully operational in minutes in the event of a major incident affecting any of their offices.”

To ensure maximum availability and redundancy, in addition to the centralised Avaya core switch, each centre can run in a standalone mode with local PSTN connectivity, offering the same functionality and providing resilience in the unlikely event of the centralised network failing. According to Sanders, “For our clients we are the first and last line of defence in any major incident. The key for us is to offer complete peace of mind to our clients, that they can rely on us to keep their businesses up and running whenever they need it 24/7.”

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