One of the risks of having business-critical cloud based applications or IP telephony is your internet connection going down. Most SMBs can only afford to lose access to email or other apps for a few minutes at a time, if at all. However, as many of us who have suffered through the recent transition resulting from the purchase of a prominent ISP have learned, most outages last at least an hour or longer. In a recent survey, seven out of ten of the IT pros surveyed said they’ve experienced an unplanned network outage within the last six months, and 35% have had at least three in the last year.
An obvious solution for this problem is to have more than one WAN connection from more than one provider. That way if one connection goes down or is experiencing slowness due to an overload of traffic, the business internet can be easily switched to the failover internet connection. The primary and failover WAN connections are configured in the firewall and connections can be easily be switched over on the fly. While some small businesses may be reluctant to pay for two internet connections, many find the investment to be worthwhile when faced with hours or possibly even days of downtime and lost productivity.
For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 448-7100 x210.