Redundant/Multiple Internet Connections
What is redundant Internet access?
Using more than one ISP or WAN link to ensure that if one link fails, a separate working link is available to send and receive Internet traffic. Many businesses use three or more redundant Internet links to ensure that important Internet-based business applications aren't shut down by a 'single point of failure'. Using redundant Internet links including DSL, cable, wireless and other network connections requires the ability to automatically switch traffic among multiple Internet links.
What types of businesses need more than one ISP?
Typically any business, regardless of size, that has important internal and customer applications going over the Internet should be protected with ISP failover. E-commerce applications and mission-critical applications such as VoIP, ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications that employees depend on to do their work and who would be idled by an ISP failure. VPN and video conferencing are other applications that would fail if a sole ISP carrier failed. Customer applications can include customer service applications, order entry applications are others that have become integral to daily business operations.
What is the impact of ISP outages on small and medium-sized enterprises?
The average annual outage for T1 connections in North America are in excess of 8 hours. DSL, cable, fiber and wireless connections are significantly higher. During these outages organizations will suffer from lost business, lost revenue, lost employee productivity and lost credibility with customers, partners and employees. Typically these losses cumulatively are in the thousands of dollars per hour, making broadband connectivity with cable and DSL redundancy critical.
What are bandwidth guarantees, and what types of applications need them?
Bandwidth guarantees (also known as Quality of Service [QOS] rules or traffic shaping rules) are techniques to provide a minimum amount of bandwidth to certain types of applications or Internet traffic to guarantee high availability. Less bandwidth may thus be available to less critical traffic, such as employee web browsing.(Indeed these applications can be assigned low bandwidth to discourage use.) WAN load balancing and failover appliances can be configured to aggregate and "traffic manage" Internet applications so that high priority applications are always guaranteed the bandwidth they need.
Types of applications that may require minimum bandwidth applications include VPN, VoIP, order entry and credit card processing applications and others whose disruption can have heavy operational or financial impacts.
For more information on bandwidth aggregation and VPN failover, see our white paper on Bandwidth Management QoS.
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