Earlier this month, Zoom experienced a global outage during the US working day, affecting a substantial chunk of its user base. Although it recovered a few hours later, that period of hobbled collaboration exposed the challenges UC outages pose to IT leaders and the organisations they oversee.
It recalled the calamitous incident last July when tech leaders worldwide faced their collective nightmare: a faulty CrowdStrike update cascaded through Microsoft’s ecosystem, grounding flights, shutting down hospitals, and leaving millions of workers staring at blue screens.
The outage exposed an uncomfortable truth about modern UC and collaboration platforms: the same all-in-one efficiency that makes them indispensable also produces dangerous single points of failure.
The appeal of all-in-one UC platforms is undeniable. They simplify procurement, streamline admin, and cultivate seamless user experiences. However, as the Microsoft incident excruciatingly illustrated, when these systems fail, they can undermine entire organisations.
While no strategy can completely eradicate outage risks, forward-thinking IT leaders can implement practical measures to reduce their vulnerability and preserve business continuity.
Strategically Diversify Your UC Portfolio
The most striking lesson from the CrowdStrike incident is also the most problematic to implement: avoid over-reliance on a single vendor. This doesn’t necessarily mean preserving multiple full-scale UC environments, which can be a costly and complex proposition, but instead strategically diversifying critical comms channels.
Industry experts suggest pinpointing which communication functions are absolutely business-critical and ensuring redundancy specifically for those critical services. For instance, this might mean maintaining a separate, lightweight voice solution that can keep operations ticking even when the primary collab system is down.
This strategic diversification might encompass maintaining secondary voice functionalities via a different carrier or tech stack. It’s also shrewd to institute emergency messaging systems on separate infrastructure and make sure that critical video conferencing capabilities are available through an alternative provider.
The end goal isn’t duplicating your entire UC stack but ensuring essential comms can endure during a primary system failure.
Set Out Crystal-Clear Outage Response Protocols
When major UC outages transpire, the biggest productivity danger is frequently confusion about what alternatives to turn to. Organisations need clearly documented, habitually updated, and well-communicated outage protocols.
Leading organisations have developed and refined simple, colour-coded outage response frameworks that every worker can access offline. This strategy means that when systems go down, employees know precisely which backup tools to utilise for different types of communication without needing immediate and elaborate IT guidance.
These protocols should entail offline-accessible documentation, such as QR codes to download emergency apps. They should also incorporate regular drills to build staff awareness of alternative workflows, designated comms coordinators for each department, and pre-configured backup systems that need very little IT input actually to activate.
Introduce Thorough Local Caching and Offline Capabilities
Modern UC platforms often rely extensively on cloud connectivity, but local caching and offline functionality can afford invaluable resilience during outages.
Forward-thinking IT departments have bolstered local caching for their collaboration tools, enabling teams to continue accessing recent documents and communication threads during connectivity issues. The key ingredient is making these capabilities work automatically rather than necessitating users to prepare for offline situations.
Organisations should consider reviewing offline capabilities across their UC stack and potentially supplement with third-party offerings designed explicitly for offline resilience.
Consider Zero-Trust Architecture for UC Systems
The Microsoft/CrowdStrike incident underlined how security measures themselves can become vulnerability points. A zero-trust approach to UC architecture can help mitigate these risks.
According to industry best practices, restructuring UC environments into distinct segments that don’t automatically trust each other can massively boost resilience. This approach means a failure in one area doesn’t necessarily cascade across the entire system.
This approach includes segmenting UC components to contain failures and adopting strict verification between those system components. Organisations should also keep separate authentication mechanisms for backup systems and habitually test component isolation effectiveness so that the strategy works as planned.
Revisit SLAs and Support Agreements
During the CrowdStrike incident, many organisations discovered that their service level agreements didn’t adequately address major outages or provide tangible remediation.
In the aftermath of the July outage, many organisations fully revamped their vendor contracts. These updated agreements now include specific provisions for prominent outages, such as escalation protocols, alternative comms channels with support teams, and concrete, meaningful recovery timelines.
When negotiating with UC vendors, organisations can focus on detailed incident response procedures and timelines that are clearly defined in writing. They can also centre around guaranteed support access methods that don’t hinge on the impacted systems themselves.
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