Is Your Communication Infrastructure at Risk?
Communication isn’t just about staying connected—it’s about staying operational. When disasters strike, cyber threats emerge, or systems fail, the robustness of your communication infrastructure can mean the difference between business as usual and a full-blown crisis.
So, is your organization prepared? Here are ten warning signs your communication systems might be more fragile than you think—along with practical strategies to fortify them.
1. If Your System Has Single Points of Failure
The Risk: Relying on a single deployment method, communication provider, data center, or communication channel leaves your organization one outage away from silence.
Example: A large healthcare organization relies on a single cloud-based communications provider for all its voice and video services. An unexpected service outage with the provider disrupts communication across its hospitals and contact centers, delaying patient care and emergency response times.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Deploy a multi-region failover strategy.
- Combine on-premises and cloud-based services for redundancy
- Conduct regular continuity drills.
- Diversify communication channels.
How Mitel Helps: When failure is not an option, you may need mixed-deployment strategies to ensure uptime. Mitel offers options with built-in failover, ensuring communication remains uninterrupted.
2. If You Only Use UCaaS and Have Complex Compliance Demands
The Risk: Maintaining compliance is a significant challenge for organizations in highly regulated industries. Weak communication landscape governance can lead to compliance failures, resulting in legal penalties, security breaches, and reputational damage.
Example: A global financial institution migrates call recording and archiving to a public cloud vendor, only to discover that the vendor's architecture doesn’t meet MiFID II or SEC Rule 17a-4’s stringent record retention policies, resulting in hefty fines.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Align communication landscape IT policies with regulatory requirements (DORA, GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2).
- Conduct regular compliance audits and risk assessments.
- Invest in governance tools that provide visibility and control over data flow.
How Mitel Helps: Navigating the complexities of compliance and regulatory demands can be overwhelming for highly regulated industries. Mitel specializes in designing communication infrastructures that address these challenges, offering tailored services and solutions, from discovery and advisory to sovereignty deployment options.
3. If You Use Out-of-the-Box or Dated Cybersecurity Measures
The Risk: Relying on minimal, check-box cybersecurity leaves gaps in protection against modern threats, whether AI-driven or insider threats.
Example: A city government’s VoIP system lacks real-time anomaly detection. A cybercriminal launches a toll fraud attack over a holiday weekend, racking up six figures in unauthorized international calls before IT discovers the breach.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Adopt a Zero Trust security framework.
- Deploy AI-driven threat detection and response systems.
- Implement end-to-end encryption and secure authentication methods.
- Use software assurance practices like secure coding, patching, and vulnerability testing to close security gaps.
How Mitel Helps: Struggling to meet demanding resilience and compliance requirements while protecting against advanced threats? Consider Mitel's mixed-deployment communication solutions, including Mitel Secure Cloud, designed to support secure data handling and sovereignty, ensuring regulatory compliance and robust protection.
4. If You're Spending Days, Not Hours, Diagnosing and Fixing Incidents
The Risk: Manual security and network management processes are often too slow, increasing downtime and risk exposure.
Example: A major airline’s contact center experiences intermittent voice quality issues. Without AI-powered diagnostics, engineers spend days manually reviewing logs, delaying resolution and leading to thousands of missed rebooking calls during a weather event.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Utilize AI-driven monitoring and automated incident response tools.
- Implement predictive analytics to prevent failures before they occur.
- Establish automated workflows for rapid recovery.
- Integrate software assurance for real-time diagnostics, proactive monitoring, and faster issue resolution.
How Mitel Helps: Incident response delays and downtime can disrupt operations. Mitel's solutions, including Mitel Critical Event Management (CEM), help organizations improve response times through automation and real-time monitoring. CEM enables faster incident resolution and reduces downtime.
5. If You’re Settling for a Minimally Viable Recovery Plan
The Risk: A basic recovery plan isn’t enough — communication infrastructure downtime can have severe reputational and financial consequences.
Example: A multinational logistics firm runs quarterly DR drills but only tests basic failover. When an unplanned data center outage occurs, their voice failover fails to reroute across global regions, disrupting customer service across multiple time zones.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Develop a cloud-based failover strategy.
- Implement real-time data replication across multiple regions.
- Regularly test and refine disaster recovery procedures.
How Mitel Helps: Business continuity and recovery planning can be challenging without the right solutions. Mitel offers unified communication solutions that support robust recovery plans and meet continuity goals. Our UC expertise also helps develop tailored disaster recovery procedures to address the unique needs of demanding communications
6. If You’re Running a Siloed Communication Ecosystem
The Risk: Disjointed and incompatible communication systems create barriers to collaboration, hinder operational efficiency, and negatively impact customer experience.
Example: A pharmaceutical company uses separate communication platforms across R&D, manufacturing, and sales teams. Due to a lack of real-time integrations, a critical regulatory change isn’t communicated in time, leading to compliance violations.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Adopt a unified communications strategy with seamless integrations.
- Utilize APIs and middleware for interoperability.
- Standardize on enterprise-wide collaboration platforms.
How Mitel Helps: Communication landscape silos and inefficiencies can hinder teamwork and customer service. Mitel’s integration specialists help organizations work more effectively by connecting different platforms, reducing silos, and improving collaboration.
7. If You Can’t Scale Because of Inflexible Infrastructure
The Risk: Legacy communication systems may not support rapid scaling, leading to inefficiencies and costly migrations.
Example: A growing retailer acquires multiple regional chains but struggles to consolidate their diverse telephony and contact center platforms. The lack of a unified migration strategy leads to fragmented customer service and high operational costs.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Invest in scalable cloud-based communication solutions.
- Establish a flexible integration framework for M&A scenarios.
- Standardize communication protocols to ensure seamless expansion.
How Mitel Helps: Scaling communication systems can be difficult with older platforms. Mitel helps organizations address these issues with cloud-based solutions that grow with the business. By standardizing communication methods, Mitel makes expansion easier, lowers costs, and improves customer service.
8. If Your Offices and Workforce Use Different Communication Tools
The Risk: Using different communication tools across teams, regions, or business units can lead to inefficiencies, higher costs, and a frustrating experience for employees and customers.
Example: A global manufacturer operates on-premises PBXs in some regions, cloud UC in others, and legacy analog systems in remote plants. This patchwork of systems results in fragmented user experiences, high maintenance costs, and inconsistent security policies.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Standardize communication tools and policies across all locations.
- Implement a federated communication landscape with multi-language and regional compliance support.
- Ensure network and performance optimization for remote teams.
How Mitel Helps: Mitel rationalizes the communication landscape by unifying experiences across teams and locations. This ensures employees can collaborate effectively, no matter where they are, while meeting regional and industry compliance demands.
9. If You Treat Communications as an Obligation Instead of a Strategy
The Risk: Communication technology should evolve with business priorities—failing to align it with digital transformation efforts can hinder competitiveness.
Example: A national insurance provider implements AI-powered chatbots for customer service but doesn’t integrate them with its existing UCaaS platform. As a result, customer calls and digital inquiries remain disconnected, leading to inefficiencies and poor CX.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Integrate communication tools with broader automation strategies.
- Ensure seamless compatibility with AI, analytics, and cloud transformation initiatives.
- Continuously reassess technology roadmaps to align with evolving business needs.
- Apply software assurance to validate integrations, optimize performance, and maintain reliability.
10. If You’re Not Reviewing Usage Data on Communication Tools
The Risk: Even the best communication technology fails if employees don’t use it. Without proper change management, resistance to new tools leads to inefficiencies, wasted investment, and poor collaboration.
Example: A hospital system rolls out a secure messaging app to replace pagers but doesn’t involve clinicians in the deployment strategy. Adoption stalls as staff revert to personal phones for urgent communications, introducing compliance risks.
Mitigation Strategies:
- Implement structured change management programs.
- Provide comprehensive training and ongoing support.
- Gather feedback and iterate on deployment strategies to maximize adoption.
How Mitel Helps: Adopting new communication tools can complicated. Mitel helps employees adjust by providing training, support, and use case guidance. Teams can also ease into the change at their own pace, using familiar systems while gradually adding new features over time.
By recognizing and proactively addressing these enterprise-level risks, organizations, can build a resilient, scalable, and future-proof communication infrastructure. Investing in the right strategies today will safeguard your organization’s operations, security, and connectivity for tomorrow.
Don't wait for a crisis to test your communication resilience. Use Mitel’s Advisory Services to audit and align your landscape to needs and use cases. As a trusted UC expert, we can help you proactively identify vulnerabilities and implement robust solutions so you stay connected.