By maintaining Nortel CS1000 after end-of-service-life many organizations will achieve cost savings, but they will have to wrestle some massive security, resiliency and customer experience questions.
This is the second in a series of blogs that looks at some big CS1000 end-of-lifecycle management challenges. It focuses on managing the increasing danger of outages and slower remediation speeds and poses a coping strategy.
Why bother?
There’s an army of support and maintenance providers that have strengthened the business case to extend the lifetime of a Nortel CS1000 system.
At face value the logic seems compelling, the SLAs offset the absence of Avaya, the cost is minimal compared to a rip and replace and the business risk is negligible compared to the risk of a migration.
But are they really safeguarding resilience?
It’s tempting to point to problems around sourcing stock when a failure occurs, but whilst this does happen it isn’t the biggest challenge surrounding resiliency – the greatest threat to Nortel CS1000 support and maintenance is visibility and transparency.
The growing reality is that a perfect storm is brewing.
CS1000 is part of a voice environment that 3rd parties only partly support, and by outsourcing, organizations lose visibility of the current environment, (and parts of it are already out of support and invisible).
Wind forward to a voice outage and maintenance providers could fix part of it, the rest is down to the knowledge and skills base that exist in the organization.
The result? It takes longer to find and fix voice outages and the impact is deeper on the business and its customers.
Is there an answer?
Create total visibility of the ecosystem that surrounds Nortel CS1000
One solution is to conduct a complete audit of the voice ecosystem. It provides complete visibility of the environment and highlights the factors that could impact CS1000 resilience.
It will help inform the right SLAs with support and maintenance partners, and it could reduce downtime from outages.
Here are some pointers on the most effective audit:
- Ensure the audit is done by those who are subject matter expertise across all the technologies in the voice environment.
- Don’t focus on specific technologies, target full knowledge of the current architecture of the voice environment.
- Fully analyze and document the complete voice ecosystem.
- Understand what is nearing and what is past end-of-life or end-of-service, to optimize the management of aging legacy
- Deliver total visibility of the greatest potential single points of failure across the voice environment
One final thought: continued Nortel CS1000 success could come down to attitude: by extending post end-of-support-life, organizations cannot take an out of sight and out of mind attitude to this voice technology. Voice teams must ask one killer question: how does Nortel CS1000 continue to be a strong point and not become a single point of failure?
