In today’s highly competitive business environment, every minute of communications downtime has a price. Lost connections mean missed customers, delayed sales, and stalled opportunities. To prevent that, organizations invest heavily in redundancy strategies that keep communication running when systems fail.
One increasingly common approach is dual UC licensing, where organizations maintain two unified communications platforms, typically a primary UCaaS provider and a backup for disaster recovery purposes. For businesses where uptime is non-negotiable, this can seem like a sound safeguard against disruption.
Yet the protection comes at a steep cost. UCaaS platforms are expensive, and maintaining hundreds of backup seats that see little or no use can quickly strain IT budgets. More concerning, recent events like the AWS or Cloudflare outage have highlighted an uncomfortable truth: if both platforms depend on the same underlying cloud infrastructure, failures can occur simultaneously.
There is a better way to achieve resilience. A fully diverse continuity model can keep communications running during outages while avoiding the waste and complexity of duplicate cloud phone systems.
The Hidden Costs and Vulnerabilities of Dual Licensing
Organizations maintain backup UC platforms to avoid the cost of downtime, but keeping two systems creates its own significant financial drain. Microsoft Teams Business with Teams Phone add-on and Cisco Webex Business calling plans can cost hundreds of dollars per user annually, meaning organizations maintaining both platforms for redundancy effectively double this expense per user each year.
Beyond licensing fees, operational expenses, such as upgrades and maintaining configuration parity, compound the burden. Organizations must invest in training staff on both platforms, maintain administrative expertise across two systems, and ensure help desk teams can support users in either environment.
Lathan Lewis, Head of Products at Tango Networks, explains:
“Although the other platform is just there as insurance, you still have to invest in training your staff to understand how to properly operate it in the event of outages.”
These requirements increase the annual cost and add significant overhead to the strategy.
More troubling than this combined financial burden is the fact that dual licensing can fail precisely when it is needed most. Several UC companies run a dual-cloud strategy, with some dependent on third-party cloud providers for significant sections of their service. Should an outage affect a cloud provider that supports both a company’s main and backup UCaaS platforms, functionality can be disrupted on both. This renders the redundancy ineffective.
These issues create a dilemma: organizations are paying substantial premiums for protection that still carries risk. One solution, however, addresses both problems by replacing the backup UC platform with a mobile network-based alternative that delivers superior resilience at a fraction of the cost.
The Solution: How Integrated Mobile UC Provides a Better Way
Rather than duplicating cloud-based UC platforms, the use of mobile network technology offers a fundamentally different approach to business continuity.
Solutions like Tango Extend demonstrate this approach in practice. Extend is an eSIM-based mobile UC network that creates a UC communication endpoint directly on an employee’s personal mobile phone, using the existing business number. This means if the enterprise uses Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex for cloud calling, the mobile phone becomes a Teams or Webex extension.
The mobile endpoint delivers business continuity during a cloud outage because the mobile device has its own connection to the telephony infrastructure via the mobile network. Similarly, when the UC platform’s application layer experiences issues, employees can still receive calls because they can still be routed via the mobile service.
This architecture allows the solution to continue functioning even during major cloud outages that could affect both a company’s primary and backup UC platforms at once.
These gains in resilience are compounded by cost efficiency. Using a mobile network solution like Tango Extend costs as little as half of a single UC platform license.
Lewis quantifies the difference:
“Fifteen dollars per user per month is really all you’re paying for everything there. It’s significantly cheaper, both OPEX and CAPEX wise.”
For a 500-employee organization, this translates into substantial annual savings compared to maintaining a backup UC platform.
Rethinking Business Continuity for Cloud Communications
The dual licensing dilemma shows that organizations are paying substantial premiums for a solution that still leaves gaps. Although major cloud outages affecting both platforms simultaneously are relatively rare, maintaining two cloud-based systems offers no hedge against that scenario.
UC Integrated mobile network solutions change this equation. By providing communication pathways that operate independently of cloud platforms, they address both application-level outages and infrastructure failures through a single implementation.
For organizations currently maintaining dual UC platforms or looking to invest in a backup UC solution, switching to mobile network solutions means safeguarding budgets from unnecessary costs while offering protection from the full range of outages that dual licensing cannot address. This approach represents a fundamentally smarter strategy for keeping business communications running when systems fail.
