Put differently, does your company have a critical need to be available 24/7? Imagine, you are a healthcare organization that isn’t reachable in case of emergency or a bank that isn’t able to deal with transactions requested from their customers. The consequences of a potential outage could be disastrous. Therefore, redundant system components are a must for many businesses around the world and that also includes the operator consoles, also known as attendant solutions.

Why would any business want to implement a second or a third server? Because high availability is then guaranteed, as the communication between those redundant servers enables permanent communication and transaction of data, therefore covering system outages. High availability is also useful during extensive maintenance cycles and other system updates that require a partial shutdown. However, a redundant system of attendant consoles alone does not do the job. What now?

You therefore need to ensure that redundancy is also guaranteed in the system components of your attendant consoles. The good news is, that most vendors in the area of telephone architecture develop redundant systems that allow instant switches in case of a system outage. With Skype for Business or Cisco's Call Manager, for example, multiple front-end servers are installed to prevent a system error and allow to fallback to alternative servers. An alternative are load balancers, acting as routers between two workspaces. This way, the traffic between two servers is monitored for availability. In case of a system outage, those load balancers react and redistribute or reroute the entire traffic to the redundant and available server.

Also, don’t worry about your operators: the process is managed so tightly that after a system outage, operators do not even have to login again to keep the client session open. But in order to guarantee actual redundancy, it is key to also take care of the underlying databases. Again, no need to worry, as those databases are easily replicable with out-of-the-box solutions of the selected database system.

You didn’t want to invest more into your communication architecture? Think about it. The additional cost of high availability of your attendant consoles is marginal compared to the overall investment of your telephone infrastructure. And it certainly pays off in case of emergency.