In today’s highly competitive business environment, every minute of communications downtime has a price. Lost connections mean missed customers, delayed sales, and stalled opportunities. To prevent that, organizations invest heavily in redundancy strategies that keep communication running when systems fail.
One increasingly common approach is dual UC licensing, where organizations maintain two unified communications platforms, typically a primary UCaaS provider and a backup for disaster recovery purposes. For businesses where uptime is non-negotiable, this can seem like a sound safeguard against disruption.
Yet the protection comes at a steep cost. UCaaS platforms are expensive, and maintaining hundreds of backup seats that see little or no use can quickly strain IT budgets. More concerning, recent events like the AWS or Cloudflare outage have highlighted an uncomfortable truth: if both platforms depend on the same underlying cloud infrastructure, failures can occur simultaneously.
There is a better way to achieve resilience. A fully diverse continuity model can keep communications running during outages while avoiding the waste and complexity of duplicate cloud phone systems.
The Hidden Costs and Vulnerabilities of Dual Licensing
Organizations maintain backup UC platforms to avoid the cost of downtime, but keeping two systems creates its own significant financial drain. Microsoft Teams Business with Teams Phone add-on and Cisco Webex Business calling plans can cost hundreds of dollars per user annually, meaning organizations maintaining both platforms for redundancy effectively double this expense per user each year.
Beyond licensing fees, operational expenses, such as upgrades and maintaining configuration parity, compound the burden. Organizations must invest in training staff on both platforms, maintain administrative expertise across two systems, and ensure help desk teams can support users in either environment.
Lathan Lewis, Head of Products at Tango Networks, explains:
"Although the other platform is just there as insurance, you still have to invest in training your staff to understand how to properly operate it in the event of outages."
These requirements increase the annual cost and add significant overhead to the strategy.
More troubling than this combined financial burden is the fact that dual licensing can fail precisely when it is needed most. Several UC companies run a dual-cloud strategy, with some dependent on third-party cloud providers for significant sections of their service. Should an outage affect a cloud provider that supports both a company's main and backup UCaaS platforms, functionality can be disrupted on both. This renders the redundancy ineffective.
These issues create a dilemma: organizations are paying substantial premiums for protection that still carries risk. One solution, however, addresses both problems by replacing the backup UC platform with a mobile network-based alternative that delivers superior resilience at a fraction of the cost.
