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.
