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.
And then there are malevolent forces to contend with too.
DDoS attacks are on the rise and can cripple a communications network in moments.
Splicecom’s ‘Network Survival Gateway’ software provides user organisations with instantaneous failover in the event of an outage by cleverly ‘mirroring’ the connectivity and functionality of their communications stack.
Sitting on user organisations’ cloud-based or on-premise networks, it retains a constant ‘keep alive’ check to its ‘Master’ system whilst ‘mirroring’ – duplicating all aspects of users’ systems.
Desk Phones, PC, softphones, smatrtphones and legacy analogue devices can automatically re-register to the gateway and SIP services can also failover, using lower level connectivity.
Additionally, all call data is saved and call reporting and recordings continue; buffered locally and uploaded to ‘Vision’, Splicecom’s centralised business management application, upon service restoration.
“It’s not a case of managing two different environments,” says Hayman. “With the constant live mirroring, the organisation’s single and only environment is replicated. Everything remains functioning and up to date as if the outage had not occurred.
“The user organisation can either do a forced return after an outage has been resolved or it can be customised to do so automatically when normal service has been resumed”
From a Return on Investment perspective, the solution is a virtual no brainer.
Offered as part of a reseller or Managed Service Provider’s existing service wrap, it makes for a cost-effective addition to end user customers’ IT toolkits.
And, pre-contract, it makes for a very compelling conversation starter.
After all, for every organisation, 24/7 communication connectivity should be non-negotiable…and failure simply isn’t an option.
To learn more about how Splicecom can help your and your customers’ businesses thrive, visit www.splicecom.com
