Nobody likes network outages.
It’s a pain for everyone when they first get into the office in the morning and find out that they have no access to their critical work applications. It causes frustration with users, which in-turn causes frustration for the IT team supporting them and ultimately—if it lasts long enough—it can cause frustration for the company executives due to loss of productivity.
To compound the issue, you have a huge loss of productivity from IT who’s focused on making the business more efficient and effective, yet it’s running down issues with carriers that can take hours to fix. So it’s an opportunity cost for IT as well.
Let’s face it, for all parties involved it’s a huge time waste.
Here’s the truth:
Today, through the evolution of equipment, software and ubiquity of broadband, there’s really a pretty simple fix to network outages.
Two devices terminating two connections, professionally configured and installed with a third party opening tickets for critical alerts, equals 99.99% uptime.
This isn’t rocket science, especially when you’ve done it several times over. However, it does require planning and installation. On average though, this type of 99.99% uptime environment can be achieved in 1-3 months or less for most locations.
For businesses that require as close to 100% up-time as possible, they’ve probably already taken some of these steps to get there.
But here’s the kicker:
At least 50% of the mid-markets (and even higher of the SMB market) still haven’t addressed this at all their sites. The common challenges cited for this is that the IT team can’t find the time, it’s too expensive, they have limited internal resources, too many other projects that are more important, etc.
Another truth is the cost of having a second circuit and a third party to monitor it isn’t a budget breaker. It’s only 10-15% more per month than you currently pay for a single circuit with the peace of mind that your business will have the network operating at 99.99% uptime.
Businesses require continuity of communications with their users, clients and vendors. Our advice would be to not go this alone.
Although it sounds like something any business can handle internally, your team has another agenda at stake which is making the business more efficient and innovative rather than getting bogged down ordering circuits, managing installs of circuits, configuring and installing equipment, demarc extensions, and monitoring all devices 24/7/365.
This isn’t simple and it’s months, if not years, to implement if you don’t do it every day. Let a partner do the heavy lifting of rolling out this type of initiative. We’ll happily raise our hands and say let it be Wired Networks.
This is what we do—day in and out—and we do it really well. Just ask our customers.
