DDoS attack, unstable internet connection, hardware or software failure: whatever the cause, losing a network can be catastrophic.
In today’s modern world, 24/7 communication capability is mission-critical.
For some sales-based organisations, just a few minutes of downtime can equate to huge financial losses.
For those involved in manufacturing, healthcare or education, an inability to communicate quickly and effectively with workforces in an emergency can have even worse implications.
Many organisations risk everything by ignoring the potential for technological breakdown.
But, as tech stacks grow ever more complex, the benefits of slick and affordable failover are obvious.
Cue: reseller opportunity.
“There is nothing more important than an always-on communications network – when they go down, the consequences can be extremely serious,” says Robin Hayman, Director of Marketing & Product Management at UK-based, channel-focussed voice solutions provider Splicecom, which has the perfect answer.
“Organisations should be encouraged to not necessarily see it as a technology play but more of a health and safety issue. They should be asked the question: what would happen if your calls can’t get through?
“Not just external calls but internal communications too. What if there was an accident at a manufacturing plant? What if there was a lockdown incident at a school or hospital? What if there was an emergency in a large hotel? Guests or staff wouldn’t be able to call reception.
“What if an organisation’s lift phones go down; or their Tannoy system; or their secure door entry system?
“Then let's say those incidents have serious consequences resulting in expensive litigation, fines or compensation.
“Of course, there are always commercial implications to outages, but the health and safety ramifications often go unconsidered.
“They are all ‘what ifs’, but surely it is best practice to have processes in place which remove ALL risk?”
It certainly should be an easy conversation for resellers to have with their end user customer organisations – particularly when many of those organisations’ internal and external managed communications systems have been migrated to the cloud and unified.
It’s stark: lose your cloud connection and you lose everything.
An alternative would be for workforces to be expected to communicate via a smartphone app. But not everyone has a business-supplied smartphone and 4G and 5G signals cannot be relied upon everywhere.
Additionally, organisations could deploy multiple connections with failover. But secondary connections would have to match the power of their primary cousins, and the costs may be prohibitive.
