Cloud Link Down

Perception is everything, and just when you think it isn't, you may find yourself knee-deep in explanations of how a downed link to the cloud has crippled your organization.

Some business users may dismiss the seriousness of an outage because it gives them some quiet time as IT reboots the assets and finds a quick fix. But for IT, the reality is that even short business disruptions cost money and drain organizational effectiveness. You need redundant links and other back-up solutions at the ready.

For voice, one option is re-routing traffic to an automated attendant in the cloud. With DID, you can route overflow directly to cellphones or forward to voicemail. For data, routing cellphones can be very limiting and potentially expensive. Credit-card processing devices, on the other hand, can easily use the cellular network since these transactions are time-limited.

Still, a one-link business stands to lose a lot. Secondary Internet connections are available, and the cost of this insurance against outages is low. While there are plenty of workaround solutions to deal with Internet outages, nothing is as good as having a secondary route. Once disruption occurs, the cost is already borne in terms of the impact to the company.

Here's a case in point I recently encountered.

When the sole Internet connection for a campus was down for an entire day, teachers effectively lost their ability to teach online. Fortunately, instructors reverted to traditional classroom instruction methods. While this disruption was less severe, the significance of the outage was the limited internal communications.

With a dependence on hosted communications, the campus had no communications solution in place for emergency responses, such as notifications for Code Blue or Code Reds or medical emergencies. It's not sufficient to plan for outage with an "everybody has a cellphone."

For many businesses, the cost of a secondary Internet link is insignificant. Yet many fail to secure back-up connectivity, and end up realizing the hard way that the risk wasn't worth it in terms of expense or impact on business operations.

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