If you’re reading this, you’ve probably experienced a call center outage—or you’re afraid one will happen soon. Either way, outages spell bad news for IT teams who manage the technology. The fact is that outages are more common in the on-premises world than in the cloud world. So it’s important to prepare for the worst—or adjust to prevent it.

You work hard to prevent outages in your on-premises call center. As part of the IT team, it’s your job to prevent crashes and keep your on-premises software up and running. To do so, your team has planned and prepared for almost every scenario.

  • You scaled vertically.
  • You added more servers for backups.
  • You added even more servers for call volume.
  • You added yet more servers for new features, such as texting and chat.
  • You added still more servers for data.
  • And you added—yep, you guessed it—some more servers, just because you felt you need more servers.

But it’s these very redundancies that will cause your call center to crash. All of these extra servers and redundancies are potential breaking points. A database will get overloaded, a call server will get overloaded, a software upgrade will break something and a patch will fail. It’s going to happen—and the problem can’t be solved with continuous vertical scaling.

Adding More Servers Won’t Fix Things

The fix is simple. Dump the servers altogether. Let them go. Move them out. And bid goodbye to the headaches, the sleepless nights, working on weekends and the added costs.

There’s a better option; you just need to look up to see it. The solution is in the cloud. A true cloud call center offers benefits that can’t be reproduced in on-premises solutions—at least not for the IT budget your team has at their disposal.

Microservices Architecture Provides Stability, Redundancy, and Scalability

A true cloud platform, such as the Genesys® PureCloud® platform, is built on a microservices architecture. Each function is a separate, decoupled microservice that doesn’t depend on or affect another microservice. And each microservice has virtually endless redundancies. If one goes bad, another steps in. If a new upgrade doesn’t go smoothly, the old version is standing by to take over. If volume spikes, the system grows automatically. The result: no crash.

Cloud Uses the Best Database for Each Function

Unlike on-premises solutions, a cloud solution has a host of database technologies to pull from—using the best database for each function. Yours typically just has a relational database, which is big and robust, but terribly slow. Microservices go to the appropriate database for the task and keep things moving swiftly. That means heavy call volume on Black Friday won’t send the system spiraling—and neither will heavy chat traffic on Cyber Monday.

Server Updates and Patches Are a Thing of the Past

Continuous delivery within a microservices platform makes upgrading and patching servers a thing of the past, and it prevents server crashes that happen after buggy upgrades. As new updates are launched (behind the scenes and on your behalf), they’re rolled out slowly and in a controlled manner. This means that only a small portion of users can access the updated microservices.

If a bug is discovered during the Red-Black deployment, the update is pulled and the system reverts to the previous version automatically. All original instances are kept in place until the update proves 100% effectiveness. Compare that to updates in on-premises environments, where you either deploy the upgrade or you don’t—and then you cross your fingers and hope for the best.

A Cloud Platform Lets You Extend and Customize

A cloud-based call center also offers you more flexibility. Sure, an on-premises solution can offer unmatched customization, but it’ll cost you man hours—coding, testing, managing updates, and custom patches, dealing with consultants, and so on. The PureCloud solution was the first call center platform to embrace an API-first design methodology, and it has built-in extensions with many applications in the AppFoundry  Marketplace. That means that it’s much easier to extend or customize capabilities. And you can use the public APIs for further customizations.

Whatever your needs, the PureCloud platform provides a wealth of flexibility. Use the robust features right out of the box or customize as you need.  The PureCloud solution offers the best of build or buy—in a single proven platform. See the PureCloud platform in action; take a product tour.