Most drivers would not contemplate using their cars without insurance, because the cost of that insurance is low in comparison with the loss if the car were written-off in an accident. This is even though the chance of incurring major damage is known to be quite small over the life of the car.

If your business relies heavily upon it's broadband or WAN connections, have you calculated the loss it would incur if your connections were offline for only one hour?

Putting in place backup connections (also known as redundancy or diversity) is not as expensive as you might think. But business should not imagine that using 3G or ADSL as redundancy for their high speed fibre service is anything other than a waste of time. Redundant services should be symmetric, corporate grade and capable of running at speed of at least 25% of the primary to have any chance of maintaining business continuity when they are called upon.

And to ensure any redundant connection will not be affected by the same outage that affects the primary connection, the providence of the secondary connection should be checked to ensure there is no reliance on the same carrier at any point in the overall solution.

Pacific Wireless offers a range of products to support businesses with high-availability requirements. Wireless Connect has innovative usage-based plans that offer low-cost standby pricing, and options to use the connections off-peak for data replication.

With Pacific Wireless, you can be sure that the network is entirely independent of all other carriers and ground-based infrastructure. We also offer an independent, suburban data centre product in Niche-DC to allow you to create a low cost disaster-recovery office, and integration is a breeze with our Smart-Net range of products, including Wireless Fusion, WAN-D and Smart-DC.

 

Can your business still operate if your primary connection is down?

If you're still unsure whether your business needs this type of solution, consider whether any of these descriptions sound like they might apply to your business:

• We can’t afford to lose broadband connectivity for more than a few seconds/minutes
• We transact online and every minute offline costs $$$
• Logistics/POS/ERP systems at remote sites can’t operate if head office systems are not available
• We host servers our customers use to research and order our products
• Mobile sales staff and home workers can’t work unless they can ‘VPN’ into head office
• We run ‘Just in Time’ and can’t order from our suppliers if our network is down
• We turnover $100m and our business pretty much stops when head office is offline. So each hour of downtime costs us $50,000 in lost output.

 

Did you know?

Some great thoughts to mull over:

• All copper-based broadband relies on Telstra when the fault has occurred in the physical telephone line
• Telstra’s usual target turnaround time is close of business next business day
• If fibre is damaged in the ground, it’s a specialist job to splice a repair piece that can take several hours
• If either fibre or copper is cut by the dreaded backhoe, there will be many cables to repair and, if yours is the last to be done, your outage could easily exceed 24 hours and has been known to extend for several days

• Faulkner Information Services found that 50% of companies that lose their data due to disasters go out of business within 24 months
• The U.S. Bureau of Labor indicates that 93% of companies that lose their data are out of business within five years.
• Most businesses take backups of their data, but few test to see if a restore will actually work
• Most businesses do not have spare servers onto which they can restore all of their backups
• Most businesses take backups of their data, but few keep copies offsite
• Most businesses with more than 20 employees have nowhere they can work from if their primary work site is not available, for whatever reason

• With today’s server virtualisation techniques and low cost hardware, standby systems and data storage are inexpensive
• City data centre space is at a premium as cloud-computing grows exponentially, but a suburban disaster recovery centre like Niche-DC can offer low cost space for servers and hot-standby desks