24 Apr Staying Connected
In the past when we’ve engaged business owners about backup Internet connections many times the response has been “If the Internet goes down it’s not a big deal because all out people can still work”. Well with more and more businesses shifting to support remote workers and cloud based applications this is no longer true.
When a business owner is considering redundant Internet there are a couple of things that should be considered.
- Know what you are mitigating against. The best example of this is years ago I sold a client multiple T1 connections from different carriers. This seemed like a bullet proof redundancy plan, until a truck took out a telephone pole 6 blocks from the client and both lines went down. My bullet proof plan suddenly had a great big hole in it. Are you needing to mitigate against a carrier going down? A line being cut? A power outage? Depending on the answers to these questions it will lead you to a path of action.
- Know the cost for mitigation and failure. This is a place where I see a lot of business owners do only half the work. Business owners are often very good at looking at a price tag and saying “this is too expensive”. But they do not look at the cost of a failure. We need to be asking “how much will it cost you if you go down”. For instance if a business owner does not want redundant Internet connection it is easy to say “you will save $500/mo by not having a second connection”, however when the Internet goes down the owner then says “I’m losing $50,000 a day in lost productivity”. It’s always better to have that conversation when it is theoretical, rather than a real outage.
- Know what an outage is. This sounds really obvious, however this is something that has happened many times. Example a client’s primary Internet provider is still up, however they have a routing problem resulting in Internet traffic failing. Clients will call and say “Why didn’t it fail-over to the secondary circuit”? It didn’t because the primary circuit was not down. It’s important to define the fail-over criteria and test it!
- Know when to move your systems. One of my favorite movies is Death-proof. The premise is Kurt Russel builds a car that no matter what happens he will survive a crash. When it comes to company systems it can get very expensive to mitigate against all possible situations. You have to know when it is best to death-proof your company office, and when it is best to move systems to the cloud or both.
Keeping your company up, and accessible for your employees and customers is important. If you need help with business continuity, disaster recovery, or just redundant Internet, NPI is here to help you make sense of the different options. Contact us today to find out more.