These days, a number of companies host websites or resources themselves, whether these are internal platforms like email, or client-facing portals through which their customers connect and do business with them. These components are essential to the company’s service portfolio, and their uptime can mean the difference between a profitable day or a considerable loss in brand loyalty and profits. They require inbound failover.
The fact of the matter is, if businesses host their own website or applications for client interaction, these resources simply must be available. In some cases, the “customers” are distributed employees of the company who rely on the services to do their jobs. Either way, not being able to access applications can spell disaster when communication links are down, even for a short time.
Ecessa sales and engineering team leader Rick Berens noted that client-facing services are essential for many businesses, and when they experience downtime, oftentimes the enterprise hosting them knows exactly how much they are losing for each hour the system is offline.
“[I]t’s not so much anymore than if you lose your Internet connection you just can’t get to the Internet,” Berens said. “There are things that businesses are doing these days that are extremely dependent on the Internet, both from a local perspective and form a publicly-facing perspective.”
Downtime Costs and Other Consequences
An ITIC survey noted that monetary losses are the top impact of downtime. A single hour of downtime for 95% of their enterprise respondents cost in excess of $100,000. But that’s not the only negative impact. ITIC reported the top five business consequences that concerned users are:
- Transaction/sales losses
- Lost/damaged data
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Restarting/return to full operation
- Regulatory compliance exposure
Thankfully, industry leading WAN solution provider Ecessa has systems that can all but eliminate the chances of downtime in a manner that is much less costly and complex than alternative offerings. When used with multiple, diverse Internet service provider (ISP) links, Ecessa’s WAN link controllers – including PowerLink, ClariLink and WANworX – provide the inbound failover companies need to ensure uptime and continual access to hosted resources. The products also include load balancing, traffic shaping and security features.
“Our solutions for inbound redundancy reliability are easy to deploy and will provide an instant return on investment in the event of a link failure,” Berens noted. “When you add up the cost of an hour of downtime, the business decision is clear. You can’t afford to be without a solution like this.”