Disaster Recovery Companion Service

8x8 Disaster Recovery Companion Service provides continuity if the data center hosting your primary 8x8 Virtual Contact Center suffers a disaster or site failure.

8x8 Virtual Contact Center Disaster Recovery Companion Tenant is a scheduled replica of your primary Virtual Contact Center tenant in the standby mode. This instance of your Virtual Contact Center tenant is hosted in a geographically diverse data center. It enables continuity for the contact center telephony traffic in the event of a site failure or natural disaster where your Virtual Contact Center cannot be accessed.

On-demand administration is available using the 8x8 Account Manager application, whether you just want more flexibility in everyday call routing, or plan for business continuity. You can divert your contact center inbound telephony traffic to your companion tenant or alternate phone numbers.

Features

• Ability to maintain business telephony continuity

• Provides geographically-diverse data center for the Companion tenant

• Ability to define and validate rerouting plans in advance
• Ability to quickly switch and self-manage routing plans
• Ability to archive routing plans
• Ability to access and restore a historical version of a routing plan

Rerouting Options

The following built-in rerouting options in Virtual Contact Center help you maintain business continuity:

• Disaster Recovery (DR) Tenant: Subscribe to Disaster Recovery Companion Service, which provides access to a secondary tenant.

  Note: The Companion Disaster Recovery Tenant is an add-on service that can be purchased separately. It requires prior configuration.

• Forward Calls: Route your contact center inbound calls to an alternate phone number such as a phone queue or workplace.

Rerouting Plans

Virtual Contact Center facilitates channel or agent rerouting using routing plans. A routing plan determines how your contact center traffic is channeled. During normal operation, you can route traffic to the primary tenant. During a disaster, you can redirect the traffic to a DR tenant or forward them to another phone number. By default, all routing plans are set to direct inbound traffic to the primary tenant.

Virtual Contact Center allows you to define:

• Normal Routing Plan: Determine call routing during normal business operation.
• Disaster Routing Plan: Determine call routing during a disaster event.
• Alternate Routing Plan: Allows to test the set up in Voice Services Channel Rerouting, validate selected routing options, and copy the validated plan to the Normal or Disaster routing plan.

Plan for a Disaster Recovery Event

An exclusive test phone number is provided with every DR tenant. At a minimum, you should use this test number as well as other designated channel numbers monthly. 8x8 strongly recommends, and most industry guidelines require, conducting a full DR failover test at least once a year.

As contact center managers , you must set up a disaster event contingency plan for the contact center, test the plan ahead of time so you can activate it instantly when you need it. The plan should identify the VCC channel numbers to be rerouted to the companion tenant or to the alternate phone numbers, as needed. With the plan in place and with a few clicks in 8x8 Account Manager, your contact center traffic is automatically rerouted without the need to contact 8x8 Support.