Contingency planning in the UC sphere is nothing new.
Companies are always looking to see how they can keep themselves communicating if they, or their UC provider, go down and they are left scrambling to keep their operations running.
However, what if something utterly existential happens, like a power outage nationwide?
Far from being something out of science fiction, the world awoke to news of the power being down for the entirety of Spain and Portugal.
The outage was one of the largest ever seen in Europe and took over 12 hours to restore power to large swathes of the countries.
This, for businesses, would be a nightmare. Not having power means that many of your cross-team communications would be stalled, and even your CCaaS features for customer support would be down. For companies operating in the healthcare or banking sectors, the repercussions could be immense.
“In the days to come, anyone running a contact center-whether it’s for schools, emergency services, utilities, or other businesses-will be looking at their systems and their business recovery plans to see if this was a one-off incident or something that could happen again in the future and which steps need to be taken to mitigate the risk of it happening again,”
Lisa Orford, VP for Contact Center at 8×8, said.
If you are an Iberian-based company, there may not have been much you could do to avoid all of the chaos.
However, tactics ranging from picking the right provider, all the way to geo-diversity and offshoring could all give some stability in these disaster scenarios.
Laying the Foundations for Resilience
As mentioned, companies based in the region hit with such a power outage would see some disruption, regardless of their contingency planning.
However, those in another country, whose provider is in the affected country, may still be able to escape the large brunt of the issues by picking a provider who has an expansive geo-diversity strategy.
Geo-diversity in this context would refer to data centers underpinning the UC service you are using.
Using data centers across different geographic locations allows providers to not only reduce latency for users and improve data availability, but enhance redundancy.
In the example of the Iberian blackout, a UC company that has data centers across the border in France, which operates on a different energy grid, would have remained operational and therefore could have taken on the increased load.
Operated under the Cisco umbrella, Webex has data centers across the globe that can provide service to a region should those in one country go down.
This can also be amplified by avoiding over-reliance on a single vendor.
Strategically diversifying critical comms channels-communication functions are absolutely business-critical-and ensuring redundancy specifically for those critical services.
You might maintain a separate voice solution that can keep operations ticking when the main UC system is down.
This might involve using a separate carrier for voice services or even employing a tech stack.
The Offshoring Advantage
Offshoring is not usually bragged about when it comes to a company talking about their CCaaS services.
Offshoring is the practice of relocating customer service operations to a third-party provider or company-owned facility in a foreign country.
Although its primary motivation is to typically leverage lower labor costs, in such a circumstance it could prove beneficial to a company.
Having an outage in the country your team is operating in this scenario will still mean your CCaaS side of the business is in operation.
That means that in most instances, the company could still handle inbound queues and technical support.
However, offshoring alone will not mean that this service remains adequate.
An outage of this scale may cause a spike in calls to the CCaaS with customers wanting to know the status of the company and its associated services.
“Based on our data and insights, the call volume to utility companies-and other similar services-can triple or more in a very short space of time. Further, these call volumes will likely stay high for days to come as people and businesses deal with the aftermath of these events,” Orford said.
This can lead to a rise in waiting times, cause more frustration, and add pressure to the recovery efforts. Equally, this stress does not end after a recovery.
“That second surge often follows once power starts returning, as people reconnect to confirm services or report ongoing issues,” Orford said.
“Without careful management, this can put additional pressure on already stressed communication networks.”
Keeping Operational in Disaster Circumstances
In an increasingly interconnected world, the Spain-Portugal power outage serves as a sobering reminder that even the most advanced communications infrastructure remains vulnerable to fundamental disruptions.
In such circumstances, disruption may be inevitable. Yet it may not have to be total.
Companies that adopt a multi-layered approach to resilience-one that combines technological redundancy, geographic diversity, and strategic partnerships-can maintain critical communication channels during disaster scenarios.
Equally, the best planning is preparation. By stress-testing your strategies in simulated scenarios, companies can see how they hold up under scrutiny.
In an era where connectivity is consistent, a total interruption is increasingly non-negotiable.
By investing in comprehensive communication contingency planning, companies can continue to provide for their customers come rain or shine.
