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Is your Internet connection reliable and resilient enough to keep your business operating? If you’re putting up with an Internet connection that can’t meet your needs, then you need to make a change.
Connectivity and uptime are vital to a business’ productivity, profitability, and quality of service.
Without a strong Internet connection, so many of the tools a business relies on every day will lag and waste company time. VoIP-based phone calls to important business contacts will cut in and out, time-sensitive emails will sit in the outbox waiting for the connection before they can send, and cloud-based data will be inaccessible.
In short, an unreliable network leads to extensive downtime. Do you know just how bad downtime is for your business?
Downtime is the term used for any period of time in which internet-based data, apps or systems are offline and unavailable. Downtime can occur in a number of situations, all with varying degrees of severity:
Downtime isn’t just expensive because you have to get your technology fixed—there’s also the fact that it brings your business’ operations to a halt. If an IT-related or natural disaster occurs and takes critical systems offline, employees will be unable to complete their tasks, yet your normal business expenses will carry on.
During that time, you still have to cover all the expenses of running a business without the revenue you would usually generate. Even if downtime does not grind everything to a halt, some of your staff will have to divert themselves from their normal work to mitigate the problem—again reducing productivity. Here are some studies showing how much time is lost every day due to IT downtime. According to a new survey of U.S. office workers, professionals waste 22 minutes each day, on average, dealing with IT-related issues. A recent study indicated that most people take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from an interruption.
However, average rates of downtime can vary greatly, depending on a number of factors:
The more you depend on technology, the more likely you are to encounter downtime. For example, manufacturers encounter 800 hours of downtime every year.
The larger your business is, the more factors there are at play, and the more likely you are to encounter downtime.
The better managed your IT systems are, the more likely you are to minimize the rate of downtime you experience.
No matter how much downtime you deal with, one thing we can all agree on is that it’s expensive. Ponemon Institute estimates that every minute of even partial downtime can cost as much as $5,600.
That’s why Internet connection failover capability is so important. Do you know what failover is?
Failover is the process of switching tasks from a failed system to a redundant, operational counterpart.
In simpler terms, failover is what should happen when your Internet connection goes down—all associated tasks should seamlessly switch over to a redundant Internet connection so that you and your team can keep working.
Properly configured failover capabilities can ensure a cold spare version of Internet connecting architecture or components is ready to take over in the event that something happens to your primary Internet connection.
Failover execution without human intervention. This type of failover is important for critical systems like servers, systems, and networks.
This is when failover is executed with human intervention. This is often used for less important components and may require approval before failover can take place.
This is the ideal arrangement for failover, in which both the primary and the backup Internet connections are running in parallel, with fully synchronized data at all times. This allows for truly seamless failover, with no lags or delays as data is backed up.
All of this goes to show why Internet connection resilience and failover capabilities are so important. That’s why many businesses are opting to use Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).
Please note—if you don’t have a technical background, SD-WAN may be a confusing topic to explore. For direct advice from a team of experts, be sure to reach out to Nexus IT Consultants with any questions you may have about this technology and what it offers your organization.
In the simplest terms, SD-WAN is a style of cloud computing that can change the way you handle network management, configuration, and performance.
Instead of a more rigid WAN network, SD-WAN allows you to configure your Internet connection quickly from a centralized location, reducing the potential of human error that can bring your Internet connection to its knees and productivity to a screeching halt.
Advantages include:
Using a cloud-based controller, an overlay Internet connection is created in order to build encrypted tunnels, define applications, determine where sites are, and more. This portal/controller is the critical lynchpin, as it’s where you manage and operate the WAN from.
Benefits offered by SD-WAN include:
While there are more complicated setups, most SD-WAN architecture is arranged with each plane tied down in order to affect the one below it:
While not present in every solution or necessary for every business, this plane allows businesses to automate certain functions.
As the end-user of this solution, this plane is where you’ll set up your policies and templates, and handle configurations.
This plane substantiates your intent onto the following data plane.
This is the on-premise device at a given location, whether that’s a campus, a branch, etc. Wherever you would put your hardware.
Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or another IaaS solution, you can put a virtual node in your VPC, and connect it to your SD-WAN as though it were just another site. Then you would go to your cloud portal on the Management Plane, and configure your policies as need be.
This is even simpler to integrate with SD-WAN, which is why it’s the key area of adoption right now. Extremely popular solutions like Microsoft Office 365 are easy to set up with SD-WAN, and it’s highly recommended to support tasks like VoIP calling and remote working.
Essentially, you just set up a secure session, and it leaves the SD-WAN location at the data plane directly, and from there goes out to the subpart of the Internet where the SaaS provider is, and makes a secure connection over there—no need to set up tunnels.
The key benefit is that your security policy can be pushed all the way down to the branch.
You may benefit from SD-WAN services if you are one of the following:
When determining how well a given SD-WAN solution will serve your business, be sure to get the answers to these questions:
Not sure where to begin? Allow us to help.
Nexus IT Consultants offers SD-WAN and redundant Internet connection solutions that offer reliable failover capabilities.
By configuring redundant, backup connections, we ensure that no calls drop, bandwidth and latency perform at optimal rates, and your business keeps moving at the pace you need it to.
Our team will assess your company’s current connectivity and related business needs, research the options best suited to you, and then help you make the right choice.