With more than 4 million seats sold, Zoom Phone has experienced spectacular growth. Employees have embraced the Zoom Rooms experience and many enterprises are eager to extend their Zoom use to include the office phone system.
Migrating to a cloud-based phone system is compelling because it eliminates the costs and time associated with deploying and managing legacy phone systems/PBX hardware and proprietary business phones. However, moving 100% of an organization’s communications infrastructure off-site can present new challenges. If connectivity to the cloud is lost, a site could lose both external communications and intra-site communications. For schools, hospitals, governments, or similar mission-critical environments, that disruption is unacceptable.
That’s why Zoom developed Zoom Phone Local Survivability (ZPLS) software. Basically, it’s a simple version of Zoom Phone call control that runs on-site (or in a local data center) and can take over if the Zoom Phone cloud is unavailable. It operates on a virtual machine, so it’s easy to deploy on a variety of computer platforms.
Once deployed, and in the event of a network connectivity problem, Zoom Phone users can maintain access to the Zoom directory for internal calls, and the ZPLS software works in concert with a Ribbon SBC to route external calls out to the PSTN – either via a local SIP trunk or a local PRI/analog line. Conversely, the Ribbon SBC will route any incoming calls to the ZPLS. The ZPLS solution works with Zoom clients and ZPLS enabled devices (phones or other devices that have configuration parameters for ZPLS).
