With cloud-based industries such as interactive voice response (IVR) proliferating, data centers have been rapidly growing worldwide; in fact, today, they are being extended to the remotest corners of the world. Despite the advantages of this geographic transparency, this brings along challenges associated with operational efficiency.

Although data centers are not the only things that prevent downtime in cloud-based systems, they are a huge contributing factor. In a recent company blog, esteemed IVR solutions provider Plum Voice notes that the only way it can guarantee 99.999 percent uptime in its hosted IVR systems is by securing multiple, independent yet interconnected data centers. By doing so, you can more freely and securely extend your data centers worldwide.

According to the company, it manages data centers in three separate locations—Philadelphia, Boston and London, England. Because these data centers are completely independent, they can serve as efficient backups for one another, with the best thing being that they’re still all simultaneously interconnected to share the load.

Plum advises that a single data center backing up one organization is simply not enough. As an example, the company points to Datagram’s Manhattan data center that went down during hurricane Sandy, taking Gawker (News - Alert), Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, among others, down with it.

As per the blog, the purpose of a data center is to house a business’ vital information to provide access to that information to the business’ customers. Additionally, it should serve as a backup; however, in the case of multiple data centers, they each exist to pick up the slack if one center happens to be or go offline (applying to such things as routine maintenance). In such a case, all services go through the backup data center (or centers).

In essence, interconnected data centers also share the load during regular operation. In that case, one data center provides service to certain parts of the network while the other data centers provide service to additional parts. It’s this type of load-sharing that ultimately ensures smooth running of hosted systems such as IVR.

In real time, concludes Plum, interconnected data centers will share the load to streamline the entire system. This, in the end, goes a long way towards providing almost 100 percent uptime – something that would be every company’s dream.

To learn more about all of Plum Voice’s offerings, visit www.plumvoice.com.

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