There are countless aspects of running a successful enterprise; employee retention and satisfaction, customer relations, effective advertising and day-to-day operation, just to name a few. With so much to think about, it is possible that two of the more costly aspects – dealing with downtime and being prepared for disaster – might slip through the cracks.Electrical outages occur, Internet servers go down and life happens. When these things ensue, there is the potential for great monetary loss, and this is especially true where customer relations are concerned. In fact, nearly 50 percent of customers will avoid a brand if they have to wait longer than five minutes due to customer service downtime – a number that cannot be ignored by any enterprise in the customer service industry.Dealing with downtime and disaster recovery is clearly an important step to take, considering just how strongly and quickly it can put one’s business at risk. Disaster recovery is a concept that deals with the ability to continue working after problems and hang-ups occur, such as natural disasters, human errors or server failures. It focuses on re-establishing business procedures and flow. Disaster recovery is also about analyzing what is affected by these downtimes, expected or not, and developing ways to take measures against its negative effects in the future. This in turn will lead to ensuring business continuity, or the ability to ensure continuous operations throughout the course of an unexpected disaster.A solution to eliminating downtime and the effects of a disaster is the implementation of a hosted call center solution. A hosted solution entails a third-party vendor managing and maintaining your call center equipment for you, where all critical company data is stored in the cloud. What this means is that if business operations are compromised, data is still secure and certain operations can stay active. Hosted call centers are a business’ proactive defense against the inevitabilities of life.