Strengthen Your Business with Network Resiliency

Resiliency is the ability to recover quickly and spring back. Today’s networks demand resiliency because downtime can be catastrophic to any business. Now is the time to review the resiliency of your network to ensure you have plans in place to prevent outages and bounce back after any unforeseen challenges.

In fast-paced, constantly connected environments, your network needs to keep up. Email has become the primary form of communication. Account databases have become the sole location of important customer information. Credit card processing has evolved and is now instant through an internet connection. Phone systems are becoming digital, allowing more flexibility for remote offices. At the end of the day, our society revolves around having a strong network and continuous connectivity to the internet. One small outage can have a dramatic impact by wiping out access to the applications your business relies on to run smoothly and serve your customers.

The good news is network technologies are constantly evolving and products like Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) are available to build strong and reliable networks that keep your business up and running.

To be resilient, you need redundancy. There are a number of events that can cause an outage including weather, technical issues at the carrier or accidental line cuts. All of these are outside of a business owner’s control, putting you at the mercy of the provider to fix the problem. Having a second or even third connection means you’ll always have a backup in place so you can plan ahead for these unpredictable events. However, simply having multiple connections isn’t enough. In order to manage the connections to provide the needed redundancy in your business, you will need a functional and reliable SD-WAN device.

Key benefits of a strong and resilient SD-WAN solution include:

Increased Bandwidth for Your Network:

Many companies rely on a single internet connection to keep their business up and running. Depending on location and what’s available in the area, connection and bandwidth speeds are limited to the provider. Many will assume that this is just how it is and deal with it. However, limited bandwidth can cause slowdowns and network congestion, which in turn impacts your business’ performance and productivity. By leveraging a SD-WAN device in the network, you can not only plan for outages by using multiple connections, you can also leverage the bandwidth from the two providers. The SD-WAN device will route traffic over both connections to increase the network speed and allow for a smoother, faster and more efficient performance of your applications.

Avoid Outages and Downtime

Failover capabilities are an attractive feature of an SD-WAN solution. One of the most catastrophic events that can occur to a network is a network outage. These outages can be caused by a number of different factors, but the bottom line is that when (not if) an outage occurs your business will be affected. The scale of the impact is determined by a number of factors including the time it takes to restore the network, the number of people unable to work, lost sales and more.

“When a site can’t communicate, we lose the opportunity to bid on a job. That means we can’t follow up on PO’s and we are unable to confirm changes or provide costs. This leaves our project managers and field staff frozen in place,” explained Jim Nonn, CIO at Egan Companies. “That productivity loss translates to revenue loss. With Ecessa’s help, our Virtual PCs and VoIP systems at our remote sites have far greater ability and far greater reliability. And, I have the confidence in saying that they’re never down.”

By utilizing SD-WAN, Nonn was able to plan ahead for a resilient network. When an outage occurs in a network utilizing a SD-WAN device with two or more internet connections, the end user never experiences downtime. Here’s how it works:

  • The SD-WAN appliance will notice the outage
  • Without manual intervention, the device will switch from sending traffic through all connections to only the available connections
  • The device will continue to test the downed connection until it comes back up
  • When the downed connection is once again functional, the SD-WAN device will automatically begin to route traffic as it was before the outage

The best part? These processes all take place while the business proceeds as usual. How’s that for bouncing back?

Reduce Costs by Replacing Expensive Connections

In some cases, a network team will bring in more expensive connections – like MPLS – to provide dedicated, private, low-latency connectivity. A functional SD-WAN device can utilize both the public connection and the MPLS, or as we see in many cases, replace the MPLS with a lower cost connection to help add-on bandwidth and increase speed. Going back to Egan’s implementation, the company was able to save over $100,000 annually in technology expenses. A large portion of that savings was seen because they were able to replace their high cost MPLS with multiple internet connections at each office location and utilizing VDI technologies at the remote sites.

Network failover protects your business from costly downtime. Looking to learn more? Download our Network Failover White Paper.

 

Download the White Paper

 

If you would like to review your resiliency plans and determine is a strong, reliable network is right for you, our team of experts can be reached at (763) 694-9949 or sales@ecessa.com