High availability is crucial in the modern business environment. If you aren't on hand to communicate with your customers, then the chances are that they'll take their interest, and their business elsewhere. Attendant solutions can help you to make the most out of your unified collaboration services, but it's important to ensure that you stay online as often as possible if you want to get the most out of your system.
Regardless of whether you're a call-center, a first-responder, or any other kind of business, high availability is essential for a truly impressive customer or client experience, and it's the only way to make sure that a potential outage doesn't have a huge financial impact on your organization. Here, we're going to take a look at the importance of high-availability, and what you can do to achieve more of it through your unique UC communication solution.
High Availability in Today's Modern Environment
The modern business communicates with customers in a range of different ways. For instance, your unified communications solutions might mean that you and your clients interact not only through phones and call centers, but instant messaging and more.
Applications and consumer facing services need to be constantly up and running in a reliable and effective manner if you want to make sure that you're having the right impression on your consumer base. After all, even one problem with a lost connection somewhere, or an issue where emails are no longer getting through to your service team, could mean that you end up losing out on significant opportunities for business growth.
Different organizations regard high availability with more significance than others. For instance, first responders and emergency organizations are required to offer a seamless operation of communication networks if they want to provide the service that their consumers so desperately need. Imagine having a hospital that's unable to take calls, or a bank that can't process transactions. High availability for businesses means having a strategy in place that ensures you're always available to contact when your customers need you most.
The Benefits of High Availability for Your Business
Perhaps the most obvious reason why your business needs high availability solutions, is that less downtime often translates to higher profits. The more time you spend offline, the less you can do to communicate with customers and clients, therefore limiting your ability to generate income. However, there's more to high availability than just the numbers. Here are some other benefits of high availability for your business:
- Reduced risk of data loss: If your system stays online more often, or has solutions in place for availability loss, you may be less likely to lose crucial data.
- Improved application performance: Your UC services may work more efficiently in systems where high-availability solutions are implemented.
- Your reputation improves: As your business comes to be known for its reliability against your competitors, you'll become more appealing to customers.
- Reduced customer impact during maintenance: When you plan for high availability, you can reduce the chances that your customers will encounter problems trying to access your services, that means that you're less likely to lose out on valuable opportunities.
More Servers Less Problems
So, what's the best solution for ensuring high availability among UC solutions and call centers? Often, the answer is simpler than you might think. Implementing a second or third server to work alongside your current call handling and customer service solutions can ensure that you maintain high availability for your customers. The communication between the redundant servers within your system means that you can enhance uptime, and ensure a permanent connection when data is being transferred.
Sometimes, however, you may find that a redundant system can't do the job of keeping your system up and running by itself. Rather, you need to be sure that other components throughout your business are up and running effectively. Most of the time, vendors of UC and telephone architecture solutions will develop systems that allow for quick switches when a system's power goes out. In the case of applications like Cisco's call manager and Skype for Business, various front-end servers may be installed to prevent system errors and allow for a fallback to alternative servers.
The Benefit of Load Balancing
Typically, experts recommend using as much redundancy as possible for your application and budget, through failover and replicated servers, like the solutions that we mentioned above. However, it's important to pay attention to the complexity of your solution. The more moving parts you have in play, the more likely you are to increase the risk of system failure.
To ensure your high availability in UC and telephone offerings, it's important to guarantee that your redundant servers will work as they should for your attendant consoles. With the help of load balancers which act as a router between workplaces and servers, you can monitor the traffic between servers and move data as necessary. In these circumstances, if a system outage takes place, the load balances will instantly react and begin distributing traffic to the available server.
Even with this system in place however, it's important to frequently test your solution. Regardless of whether you're using failover or redundancy strategies, you need to make sure that your system continues to work as it should, so that you can have peace of mind in the event of an outage.
High Availability Can Be Costly: But It's Crucial
Though high availability can require businesses to make additional investments into their UC and communications solutions, to allow for the parallel operation of various tools, most companies find that the investment, when compared to the overall investment into a business communication system, is marginal. It's hard to put a price on the benefit of having a reliable system in place in the case of an emergency.
With talkbase, you can get instant access to high availability solutions. We offer the technologies and expertise that you need to work through various UC solutions, and give industries the resources they need to keep their services up and running in the case of a sudden outage or fault.
Why is high availability necessary for operator consoles?
