Why Would My Company Need Backup Internet?

Virtually every company has an internet connection.  But why would your company want to spend the extra money for a backup internet connection?

Summary of reasons for two internet connections:

• Redundancy/failover if one connection fails
• Additional flexibility and bandwidth
• Diverse exit paths from building in case of fiber cut

Company internet usage is continuing to grow.  The internet has historically been used for communications, purchasing and sales.  Now, video conferencing usage is exploding, and many companies are moving their accounting, customer relationship management, human resources and other systems “to the cloud”, making uninterrupted internet access mission critical.  And yet, many companies still have only one internet connection.

Reason 1: Internet Redundancy/Failover

Provisioning multiple communication links from multiple providers should be an essential part of your company’s technological infrastructure. If one carrier is having a bad day and their service drops, you must have a secondary line onto which outbound and inbound traffic can fail over.  Not doing so can be extremely costly. Gartner estimates that a single minute of downtime can cost a business $5,600, on average.

Even the most reliable telecommunications providers acknowledge some probability of service disruption. Most public broadband Internet providers do not offer any service level guarantees. Unless your property is hit with a major disaster, it’s unlikely two providers will experience service issues at the same time. By leveraging two or more providers, organizations mitigate the risk of an outage or intermittent service disruptions. This redundancy, which is provided by a network device that can monitor each internet connection and automatically switch between them if there is a failure, should be a critical piece of every organization’s business continuity planning, as well as a key to optimizing daily performance.  Airosurf Wireless Internet can provide and manage such a device with its service or just provide an additional connection to be included in an existing network.

Reason 2: Leverage multiple connections for additional flexibility and bandwidth

Most businesses are discovering that, with the above-mentioned increase in video conferencing and the movement of  more of their applications and services to the cloud, their network bandwidth needs are increasing significantly.  Adding a second communication link not only addresses the need for failover, it adds much needed bandwidth. Managing multiple connections with the above-mentioned intelligent network device allows an organization to spread its Internet traffic and user applications across all the communication links and use all the available bandwidth.  Certain departmental traffic or specific applications could be routed separately through the connections.  For example, video teleconferencing traffic could be routed through a connection with similar upstream and downstream speeds, while other internet usage could be routed through a connection with faster download speeds than upload.  However, in the event one line fails or suffers unacceptable disruptions, traffic is automatically moved from that line to the better performing lines until service is restored.

An increase in Internet bandwidth and automatic failover to a secondary link ensures that staff members can carry out their online processes without interruptions and without delay.  Getting all needed bandwidth from multiple providers is the safer option, achieving redundancy not available with just one provider.

Reason 3: Diverse Building Exit Paths

Another way for businesses to ensure that their access to the internet is not interrupted is to ensure that their internet connections have different exit paths from their building.  Assuming a business has two wired connections, if both connections travel out of and away from the building in the same direction, a fiber or cable cut caused by road/sidewalk construction/repairs could affect both connections.  Airosurf’s wireless connection to the building mitigates the possibility of such a dual outage, providing even more redundancy and guaranteed uptime.

Airosurf, in business since 2003,  is locally owned and operated, and serves some of the biggest and well-known companies in the OKC Metro.  We would love to serve you!  Go to www.airosurf.com/business for more information and to sign up for a free internet analysis.