Tip 9 Failover or Failure
Do you have backup Internet with failover? Are you configured so that if your primary circuit goes down you can failover without missing a beat?
If not, you are not alone. ARG has interviewed hundreds of customers over the past 15 months and about 46% of them do not have backup Internet; but the good news is this is something you can solve pretty quickly.
WHY YOU NEED IT
Historically our servers and our users sat on site and internet just wasn’t THAT important. With the increasing reliance of on email and cloud services in just about every industry, internet connectivity is increasingly important to keep your business afloat.
Additionally, if you host servers or services onsite for remote users losing connectivity leaves you AND your remote users dead in the water without access to critical services.
Insurance isn’t sexy, but you have a one in three chance of having an outage on a circuit every year- that is a statistical 100% chance during a three year term. A recent statistic cited by Avaya stated that the average network incident cost businesses $140,000. While the financial impact varies by business, there is no denying that lost connectivity creates lost revenue, which can seriously impact your company and your job.
But you don’t need to panic. It doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated to add back up to your network.
BANDWIDTH OPTIONS:
There are many options for redundant bandwidth.
- We’ve seen redundant fiber as low as $700 a month
- Ethernet over Copper also provides high speed options at lower cost
- Many of our clients choose to go with CABLE or FIOS where it’s available which will run you more in the $80 to 160 range.
- Frankly we are happy if you even go with 4G. It won’t be the best experience but at least you won’t be completely down.
The bottom line is, that everyone can find an option to fit their budget.
FAILOVER OPTIONS:
Don’t get hung up on how to make your failover work, either. There are multiple ways to manage the failover:
- It can be as simple as setting up your secondary service with wireless access points throughout your office. Then your users can just unplug from the LAN and use your wireless access to get to your secondary service. That is easy to set up and almost anyone is going to understand how to use it.
- You could deploy a device (or redundant devices) for Failover only, Load balancing (to fully utilize multiple links) or Static Routing- sending specific traffic over one pipe or another. Many of these act as authorative DNS servers to manage inbound failover as well as load balancing across multiple links (Powerlink, Fatpipe, Radware). They are pretty complex in how they work, but simple to configure via web interfaces.
- Finally the technology that most carriers use is called BGP -that is how they manage failover and keep their networks up and running. You can deploy similar technology as a customer, it takes some additional understanding- third party expertise that can be engaged and once it is configured you generally don’t need to mess with it.
- If you are running your voice via SIP over your Internet there are also options to failover there- not just via the carrier portal, but to an alternate internet based SIP provider.
As you can see, there is a technology option for everyone for failover from simple to complex and ARG is happy to help you develop the right fit for your organization.
Redundant bandwidth is not optional anymore if you don’t have it today- get it in 2015.
If you need help, email or call us: info@myarg.com 866-521-5121