<p>Costs associated with downtime can be staggering. For small businesses that employ less than 100 people, downtime costs an average of $6,900 per hour. This sets companies back about $25,800 each year. For medium businesses, defined as those that employ between 100 and 1,000 people, that number balloons to $74,000 per hour, or $880,600 over the course of a year. For the most part, businesses aren't in a position to open their wallets for these kinds of bills, especially in this economic climate.</p><p>With so much money at stake, it's more important than ever that businesses of all sizes put in place strong disaster recovery plans in order to ensure business continuity in the event that their servers get knocked offline due to human error, storms, flooding, technology issues or other unpredictable events. Though many businesses aren't in the financially lucrative positions they were in previously, there is still good news to be had: The rise of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, coupled with the evolution and integration of Hosted Unified Communications solutions, can drastically help businesses operate as close to normal as possible, even when events outside of our control do everything to deter that from happening.</p><p>When mission critical systems went down in the past, customers had a much harder time getting in touch with businesses. Time is money, as the saying goes, and every minute that a client needed and couldn't get in touch with you could potentially have moved that client one minute closer to choosing to do business with a competitor. Thanks to Hosted Unified Communications solutions delivered through the cloud, decision makers no longer have to worry about such lapses in communication. Protected by georedundant facilities, and overseen by a team of well-trained professionals, Hosted Unified Communications solutions enable your team to remain connected even when disaster strikes.</p><p>With more and more employees opting to use their own devices in the workplaceafter all, they are more comfortable with themit continues to make sense for SMBs to harness these resources, allowing the integration of Hosted Unified Communications solutions on these devices. Employees keep their own devices on their bodies, or at least nearby, a majority of the time. This means that when an office is closed, employees can't make it in or systems are simply down, business can continue as usual in the eyes and minds of customers and clients. Because they are able to get in touch with your team as they have in the past, to them, no such disaster has affected your organization at all.</p><p><a href="http://www.telecomreseller.com/2013/12/09/byod-unified-communications-and-disaster-recovery-2/">Keep reading...</a></p>