Cisco Webex Cloud Calling’s Site Survivability

The advantages of moving business calling to the cloud are compelling. And business leaders in every industry are currently reaping the rewards of moving to cloud calling.

Even though cloud services are recognized for their high availability (Webex Calling, for example, offers a service-level agreement with 99.99% uptime), there are many businesses in which no downtime is acceptable for their calling service.

For these businesses, Webex Calling has just removed, perhaps the final obstacle keeping you from transitioning to cloud calling and enjoying all its benefits for your organization. Site Survivability for Webex Calling ensures important locations always remain connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), even during a network outage or service disruption.

In October, Cisco launched the Beta program for Site Survivability for Webex Calling. Cisco is now entering the final stage of beta, which includes testing of telephony endpoints, so this is a great time to get involved.

With Site Survivability in place, Webex Calling customers can designate a Cisco gateway as a Survivability Gateway. This gateway connects locally to the Webex Calling cloud, as well as your chosen PSTN provider.

In the unlikely event of a network outage, or any outage preventing users at the site from connecting to Webex Calling, the Survivability Gateway actively takes over call routing responsibility. Throughout the outage, the Survivability Gateway will process all external and internal calls and properly handle any emergency call routing. When service is restored, the Survivability Gateway goes back into standby mode automatically.

A survivability option is already available with Dedicated Instance for Webex Calling, based on Cisco Unified Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST). Now Cisco bringing that proven technology to their multi-tenant Webex Calling subscribers. Site Survivability uses SRST technology and adds configuration and monitoring from Control Hub, to make it that much easier for IT. Through Control Hub, administrators have a centralized dashboard where they can monitor their network, by site, in real-time, and track status of all Survivability Gateways throughout their network.

Site Survivability for Webex Calling multitenant subscribers will be generally available starting in early 2023.