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A Day Without Internet

Posted by Olivia Phan on May 22, 2017 5:00:00 AM

A Day Without Internet (1)It seems like a nightmare scenario, but it’s a waking reality for most businesses. A survey by Adweek shows 90% of all companies experience unexpected downtime, and as many as a third experience downtime every month.

No matter what high esteem you hold your network in, or how much you spend on your primary connection, an outage is likely to occur at some point. The Guardian sites some of the best-known providers as having the top outages of 2016. Major internet and cloud players from AWS to Level 3 to NS1 suffered chronic outages last year. Despite the number of 9s in the SLA, downtime is a matter of when -- not if.

Downtime Considerations

Here are a few questions to consider. How many of your daily action items occur over the internet? How many employees do you have and how many hours of the day do they complete tasks via the internet? How much do you pay them an hour?


Just beginning to look at the numbers reveals what a high multiplier can be applied to even a single billable hour of losses a company undergoes during an outage.


Redundancy

Internet is deeply embedded in every aspect of company performance. Internet connection is critical for clocking in hours, crunching numbers in quickbooks, tracking orders, running credit cards, WiFi for visitors, accessing emails, and downloading or uploading mission critical information to a cloud backup platform.


Internet redundancy must be understood as the key to business continuity if an enterprise does not want to gamble on daily profit.


When considering creating a redundant environment, it is important to make sure the backup circuit comes in on a diverse path from the primary network circuit. A different carrier may still be using the same last mile loop as their entrance to the building. While you can qualify this by checking with the provider, a great way to ensure diversity is to have two different technologies supporting the network. For example, fiber and fixed wireless will always be on different networks because they transmit their data in different methods. 

 

This diversity in technology not only protects you from outages, but also malicious actions. A backup circuit that uses Microwave technology can give you a lifeline in the event of a cable theft and ensure you still maintain access to your business critical cloud applications.


Conclusion

The cost of an outage is not only from lack of productivity from employees, but damage to reputation, lost data, or even shaken consumer confidence. This can deal a priceless blow to a company’s image. Consider the proactive approach of investing in a redundant network. It will ultimately save money and future-proof the business to avoid a profit disaster.

Topics: Network

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