The impact of failure has always been tricky to calculate.
Disruption, inefficiency, non-productivity, straight up loss of revenue - when technology goes down, the negative effects can be multiple and far-reaching.
Whether it's your own internal frailties or a third-party glitch over which you have zero control, those outages are always a nasty and unwelcome surprise.
Worse still - when they affect something upon which every person in your and your customers' business relies - the scale of the impact can be disproportionately damaging.
Take Microsoft Teams, for example. The giant communication and collaboration platform is now a critical component of millions of businesses' tech stacks. When it works, it effortlessly knits people and processes together. When it suddenly fails, everything grinds to a halt.
It makes sense, then, to deploy smart detection and troubleshooting tools.
In fact, the cost savings associated with that approach can now be quantified: and they are indeed significant. Understanding how those numbers are calculated and having the tools to keep the impact of any downtime to a minimum can make a huge impact to any bottom line. All enterprises (and Managed Service Providers) have to do is partner with a vendor that has both the insight and the solution.
"Appreciating the cost that goes into managing and optimizing the performance of organizations' Microsoft Teams deployments is hugely important - but knowing the difference that proactive monitoring and enhanced diagnostics can make to those costs is even more so," says Randah McKinnie, VP of Product at leading digital experience management software provider Martello, whose release this week of its clever Vantage DX Microsoft Outage Early Warning tool was inspired by illuminating independent research it commissioned into the potential scale of such savings.
"Anything that either supports the uninterrupted optimization of Teams or which provides an advance heads-up of a looming, unavoidable outage can have a profound effect on organisations' productivity, efficiency, and, ultimately, profitability."
Fascinatingly, Martello's research - carried out on its behalf by Microsoft consultants and analysts EnableUC - showed, via custom cost modelling, that deployment of Vantage DX can reduce the volume of O365 support tickets by 60%, and IT support headcount by 50-70%.
"If your or your customers' organization uses Microsoft Teams for its collaboration and communications, when it is unavailable your business is impacted," says Kevin Kieller, Lead Analyst at EnableUC.
"Our model, developed without any input or influence from Martello, was able to estimate the impact of deploying proactive monitoring and enhanced diagnostic tools within a Teams environment, based on different sized and configured organizations.
"Using reasonable assumptions related to operational management of a Microsoft Teams environment with 200 or more people, we found that proactive monitoring and enhanced diagnostic tools can provide a significant return on investment by reducing the amount of support labor required. Moreover, this is only part of the story because outages also impact productivity and revenue generation.
"Native Microsoft tools offer real-time monitoring but often detect issues too late, putting IT in firefighting mode. Vantage DX's proactive monitoring allows IT to resolve issues before they impact users, or notify users early and accelerate backup plans."
The solution's Outage Early Warning feature - which does not attract additional licensing costs - automatically alerts Managed Service Providers and end user organizations to service outages approximately an hour before Microsoft acknowledges an issue.
It also identifies which of a user's sites are impacted and sends alerts as services come back online. This proactive approach allows MSPs and in-house IT teams to communicate with endpoint users and activate contingency plans, avoiding troubleshooting problems beyond their control.
"By having that advance notice, everyone can focus on communicating with users so they don't submit hundreds of tickets," says Martello's McKinnie. "Organizations can also initiate any backup plans they might have. Our customers recently had early warning of an outage almost 3 hours before it was acknowledged by Microsoft so they were able to act decisively to minimize the impact."
In addition to the Outage Early Warning, the Vantage DX solution proactively optimizes O365 via 24/7 synthetic testing that simulates Teams user actions such as scheduling and starting meetings, sharing content, and sending a message. Detailed data is collected on network performance, application responsiveness, and service availability and, when an issue is detected, alerts are triggered and actionable reports generated.
"Microsoft continues to improve its built-in diagnostic reports, but they can be data rich and information poor," says McKinnie. "They provide lots of technical details but overwhelm all but the most skilled IT professionals. Additionally, they don't provide much detail outside the Microsoft environment. For example, for organizations using direct routing, session border control (SBC) details and carrier SIP trunk details are incomplete. For customers using Operator Connect, key carrier or network service provider details are sparse.
"Enhanced third-party diagnostic tools can reduce the time taken to resolve a particular incident from an average of 30 minutes to 15 minutes. Put another way, a typical support engineer can handle an average of 20 tickets per day with the built-in tools and an average of 30 tickets per day with an enhanced set of tools. Those numbers can have a tremendously positive impact on everything that matters."