What the #BeastFromTheEast taught me

As the snow slowly thaws across the UK, it seems to me that the real “melt down” was actually happening last week…

I woke up last Wednesday to heavy snow and a very… well "white" view from my bedroom window. After an exploratory walk with the dogs it quickly became clear that the kids weren’t going to school that day and my car wasn’t getting out of the drive!

I had a coffee and checked my iPhone, Twitter was alive with posts from businesses locally and across the country, announcing office closures due to the snow and apologizing for any inconveniences caused by the #BeastFromTheEast. The country wasn’t exactly crippled, but I think it’s fair to say it was semi paralysed by the unusual amount of snow we’d experienced over just a few short hours.

Within half an hour it was agreed that the Bluecube team were working from home until further notice. This decision had very little impact on our own business and we supported our customers from home in just the same way that we do from the office. However, I spoke to numerous people last week whose businesses really suffered quite badly because of the extreme weather conditions. I’ll spare blushes by mentioning no names, but a good friend and business associate of mine (you know who you are) even got stuck in snowdrifts TWICE last week trying to get to the office to man the phones!

I should probably make it clear at this point that the purpose of this blog is certainly not to brag about how better prepared we were at Bluecube than other businesses were.  That would suggest that we were in a very well-prepared minority and that wasn’t the case. Not at all, we were in fact part of a well-prepared majority, but the remaining minority was still a fair old chunk of the UK business community.

The team at Bluecube spent most of last week redirecting calls to emergency mobile numbers for our clients still using legacy phone systems and lines. That meant at least one person could answer calls from their mobile phone. Meanwhile, customers using our next generation voice product were able to turn their mobile, laptop, PC or tablet in to their office phone system extension, meaning the whole business could field calls as usual. The really lucky customers using cloud voice and with cloud-based access to their email and office systems saw absolutely zero negative impact on their business during the Baltic conditions last week.

So, what I really learned last week is that despite all the great tools now available to business in the UK, many are still prepared to risk their organisations coming to a grinding halt to save a few quid on remote working tools that they worry they may hardly ever use... erm... false economy springs to mind!

The Guardian newspaper estimated the cost of the snow to the UK economy at an incredible ￡1bn a day so perhaps a small investment in some cloud-based systems, including your phones, doesn’t seem so expensive after all?

Silverline from Bluecube gives you the same functionality whether you're calling from your desk phone, your mobile, your tablet or even your laptop, PC or MAC. In short this solution works with a huge range of devices and it's 100% managed by our own team in the UK, meaning all you need to do is know how to make a phone call. Leave the rest to us!

Don’t wait for the next business disaster to happen to you, speak to Bluecube about how to ensure your business communications stand up to extraordinary events and speak to your IT partner or team about how the cloud can help to keep your own wheel of industry turning!

Get some bright ideas right here

#snow2018 #beastfromtheeast #voip #remoteworking #cloud #hosted #silverline #disasterrecovery