How to keep meetings running when the cloud goes down 

This week’s outage of the UK courts’ Cloud Video Platform (CVP) – the conferencing system underpinning many remote hearings – was a reminder that despite the benefits of cloud-based unified communications (UC), the risks aren’t just theoretical. These services can and do go down, and when this happens, there can be real-world impacts. 

The CVP wasn’t the only high-profile cloud conferencing service to suffer an outage this year, either. In March, a power and connectivity outage at a third-party data center in the Middle East disrupted certain Webex services. For some organizations, a solution was to switch to UCaaS hosted in other regions. But for those with data residency requirements, such as government agencies, or businesses in highly regulated sectors, shifting data out-of-region wasn’t an option. 

Cloud outages are real. Are you prepared? 

If your cloud-based UC platform became unavailable, and you’re required to keep data local, what would you do? Unless the outage is only for a few minutes, stopping work until the in-region service returns is unrealistic: important meetings need to keep happening.  

If you’re to maintain business continuity, and avoid colleagues using unauthorized services, having an approved and well-understood backup UC platform is vital. 

Why your cloud backup shouldn’t be in the cloud 

It might be tempting to have a second cloud-based UCaaS product as your disaster recovery (DR) solution. But we wouldn’t recommend it. 

Many of the risks associated with UCaaS platforms come down to the fact that you’re dependent on someone else’s data centers and networks.

A more resilient DR approach is a fully sovereign service: a platform over which you, and only you, have complete control.  

Cisco is the sole vendor offering the full suite of infrastructure required to run such a self-hosted service, from the servers and networking, through to the in-room endpoints people use to join meetings.  

VQ Communications provides the management layer, apps, and integrations, tightly integrated with the Cisco platform, to enable people to administer and access the services in intuitive and familiar ways.  

The fully sovereign Cisco and VQ Communications solution is FIPS-compliant, and can be deployed in self-hosted and air-gapped configurations, on infrastructure of your choosing. Customers include organizations across government (including courts services, in case there are any justice departments looking for a fully sovereign video platform in light of the CVP outage), defense, and enterprise. 

Cloud + on-prem: Worth more than the sum of their parts 

You shouldn’t just see the Cisco sovereign service as your UC DR platform, however this would miss out on the huge benefits that a hybrid setup can offer. Increasing numbers of customers are running cloud and self-hosted services in parallel. They leverage the best of both in normal times, and enjoy the assurance that if the cloud is ever unavailable, they have alternative UC capability that’s both technically ready to go, and that staff are familiar with. 

Most of the time, organizations with hybrid UC typically use their UCaaS platform for things like team huddles, one-to-ones, and unclassified meetings. These are the high-volume sessions where security and performance demands are less stringent, and which aren’t generally mission-critical. 

Meanwhile, the sovereign Cisco platform underpins meetings with stricter security requirements, or that have greater strategic importance. Board meetings. Confidential customer discussions. Classified communications. These sorts of conferences require the added assurances around security, availability, and performance that only a fully sovereign service can provide. 

VQ Conference Manager layers in a range of tools that unify the experience for people using these hybrid services. Our Outlook and Microsoft Teams integrations, for example, make the sovereign service accessible within the tools people will already be using to access the UCaaS platform. Elsewhere, our One Button to Push (OBTP) capability supports meetings on the sovereign Cisco platform, as well as UCaaS services such as Webex and Microsoft Teams. This makes joining from in-room devices is as simple as a single touch, wherever the meeting is hosted. 

Seamless changeover in the event of a cloud outage 

Having both services in production, and deeply embedded into people’s ways of working, means that if the UCaaS platform is even temporarily unavailable, the impact on your organization will be minimal.  

The Cisco sovereign service will already be live, so won’t require IT intervention to switch on or test. Equally importantly, there will be no learning curve for users, since they’ll already know exactly how to use it to continue collaborating. All it will need is a quick all-company announcement to advise everyone that high-priority users and/or meetings should switch to the sovereign service only, until further notice. 

For your admins and service desks, making the changeover so straightforward should all-but-eliminate the deluge of support requests they’d otherwise get. This frees them to focus on dealing with the cloud issue. 

Could you maintain business continuity if your UCaaS service was unavailable? 

If you’re running any meetings in the cloud, have you got a robust alternative, such that they can continue in the event of a UCaaS outage?  

Do people know how to use it?  

Have you done a live test of this DR solution recently? 

If any of these questions leaves you feeling a little uneasy, let’s talk. We can help you assess your needs and architect a sovereign service to sit alongside your UCaaS platform, meaning you can enjoy the best of both worlds – and sleep a little easier at night. 

Book a meeting with VQ Communications today.