VQ’s Monthly News
October 2026

Welcome to our October newsletter! 

This month we caught up with the Cisco and Webex community at WebexOne, opened our new headquarters in Chippenham, and continued working with customers planning for the changes and challenges ahead in 2027.

In this issue we look at preparing for cloud outages, moving away from Cisco TMS without unnecessary risk, Cisco Live Melbourne travel plans and what sovereign collaboration really requires.

When the cloud goes down, what happens to your meetings?

This month, a Google Cloud outage massively disrupted the UK courts’ Cloud Video Platform. It served as a timely reminder that cloud communications services can and do become unavailable – and the impact can be immediate when those services support critical operations.

For government and regulated organizations, simply failing over to another cloud region may not be an option where data residency rules apply. Our latest blog explores how a self-hosted, sovereign conferencing service can run alongside UCaaS as an alternative that is already live, familiar to users, and available when the cloud is not.

Learn how to keep meetings running when the cloud goes down.

This resilience question is also one of the six layers explored in The Hidden Layers of Sovereignty. 

The white paper looks beyond data residency to assess infrastructure, data, identity, management, operations, and governance – and where hidden dependencies can undermine control.

From Austin to Melbourne

Thank you to everyone who met with VQ Communications at WebexOne in Austin. Our team spent the week catching up with customers, partners, and the wider Cisco and Webex community, with plenty of conversation around sovereign collaboration, Cisco TMS migration, and AI for private environments.

Next stop: Cisco Live Melbourne! 

Giles Adams will be at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from November 9-12. If you’re attending, book some time to discuss VQ Conference Manager, TMS migration, or secure and sovereign collaboration.

Cisco TMS: January is the end of the support window

Cisco TMS reaches end of support (EOS) on January 31, 2027. For organizations still running it, the remaining window to plan, test, and complete a migration ahead of EOS is now very small.

We’ve written a blog post on how to make that move quickly without increasing risk. It covers the questions worth asking potential replacement vendors, including:

Can it meet your security, scalability, and support requirements after migration?

Is the replacement endorsed by Cisco?

How quickly can meetings, phone books, and devices be migrated without disruption?

How simple is the platform to implement and validate in your environment?

Read our blog on how to exit TMS fast and responsibly.

In the news: planned software retirement is disruption too

Our CEO, Giles Adams, also wrote for Interface Magazine this month on why technology leaders should treat January 31 as the end of the ideal migration window, not the date to begin making decisions.

He covers why replacing a legacy platform means understanding the operational workflows that depend on it, and that the decision is more than simply choosing another product.

Read Giles’ article in Interface.

Sovereignty in practice: vendor location is only part of the picture

Can a UK software vendor support an EU sovereign conferencing environment? 

Yes – when the deployment model leaves the customer in full control of the infrastructure, data, and management layer.

Our blog post explores high-security and sovereign deployments. We cover some of the questions we hear most often, including EU sovereignty requirements, the Cyber Resilience Act, independent security assurance, GDPR, SSO and MFA, and meeting-level access controls.

Read the high-security and sovereign deployment guide.