Fact or fallacy – is it really possible to circumvent the risk of network outages?

As organisations and as humans,  our collective reliance on and the resilience of critical infrastructure has been highlighted and tested, recently. As a result, our customers are wholeheartedly focused on risk mitigation across their tech stacks with the number one question – “can we ever really circumvent outages across our tech stack and maintain productivity?”.

Of course, there are ways to plan for and architect scenarios to minimise and mitigate the risk of operational downtime. And we’re well versed at successfully adjusting, adapting and accelerating connectivity across networks, customers and architectures, using the wealth of tools and partners in our armory to keep our customers connected, safe and accessible. Our advice?

1. Understand your mission critical dependencies and manage their risk

It’s time to take a view of your critical business infrastructure dependencies. Take the time to list them out, identify and rate the risk of failure, understand third party commitments for issue resolution, and make a plan in place to mitigate the risk of outages or exposure.

Whether your mission critical applications are telephony,  customer services, marketing, financial or enterprise, start by getting some help to make sense of your current state – it’s the first step in building organisational resilience.

2. Create a robust enterprise architecture and roadmap

As organisations and functional leaders, we’re continuously contemplating new architectures, models, resources, technologies, platforms, vendors and balancing those with evolving organisational demands. The reality is, we never really make the time to step back and consider how all of the pieces of the enterprise architecture puzzle work together.

Make the time to map out your current and future aspirations at an organisational and technology level. Bringing together the IT infrastructure, data flows, business solutions, processes, KPIs and aligning those to strategic goals and objectives will ensure your architecture is configured to provide resilience now and in the future. Building this into a roadmap supports investment decisions and future planning.

3. Partner with a technology provider with a basket full of diverse eggs

Our customers continue to benefit from our end-to-end domain knowledge and expertise because we

• Have a trusted network of partners, technologies and resources to draw upon.
• Understand end to end technology, from CX to telephony through to network and enterprise
• Work to create resilient and robust architectures with embedded failovers and redundancies

Taking control of your enterprise architecture is the most powerful thing organisations can do to manage and mitigate the risks of downtime and outages. By forward planning through detailed ‘what if’ scenarios and matching solutions to better control outcomes, the risk of reliance on mission critical vendors is both managed and mitigated.