To take a single instance of a product, host it in a data centre and connect this up to your site or wide area network (WAN) you have simply changed the location of where your infrastructure sits. Yes a Telecity data centre in London will be far more secure than your own server room but the operating principles and single points of failure remain.
For most services that are not business critical or what are called “high availability” services, this works and is enough. For services that would have a serious business impact were they to go down for an afternoon as we saw yesterday – you need to look at True Cloud.
True Cloud is where you have multiple instances of your product in different locations, and services can be consumed from all the locations in real time. The key here is “real time”. It must be a live network, not a fail over plan of moving from one data centre to the other when something like yesterday occurs. This can take hours, plus the process of moving back at some point.
When looking at telephony, most would argue that standard office users whilst negatively impacted by an afternoon outage – could be managed via mobile devices and email communication. However, the contact centre is 100% business critical. To not serve or sell to your customers for an afternoon can have astronomical consequences.
Here is what a True Cloud network looks like:
- 3 Data centres, located in different geographical locations. Manchester, Birmingham, London.
- Any Cirrus end point (Cirrus desktop client (vDesk), mobile or landline DDI) can consume calls from all 3 data centres in real time.
- All customers have an exact replication of their service on ALL 3 data centres. If a data centre goes down, your latest service settings are operated seamlessly from the remaining two data centres.
- When breaking out the Cirrus network, we connect over 11 internet service providers (ISP’s) meaning your contact centre is not reliant on one single network to be operational. Public internet issues as seen yesterday can be managed and routed around in real time – not possible on a point to point SIP trunk set up over 1 network.
- Cirrus talks to every end point in real time to check its connection, dynamically routing around issues and congestion to deliver our quality of service (QoS) guarantee.
No matter how large, how resilient or how many times the contract states “no single point of failure”. When paying a subscription cost model (effectively renting services), you should get access to a network, infrastructure & resilience that wouldn’t make financial sense to build yourself. With hosted contact centre you don’t, with Cirrus True Cloud you do. It really is that simple.
