Another Network Outage? You Need Diversity

As Friday again proved, it can happen anytime: network connectivity goes down, and business grinds to a halt. No phone, no Internet, no email, no website—employees sit idle and very little gets accomplished. One hour of network downtime could cost a company at tens of thousands of dollars.

Network outages, while not common, are not inevitable. Was there ever a time where your phones and Internet were down, but businesses across the hall were still fully connected? How did that happen? Network Diversity.

Most businesses understand the need to have redundancy in their network, so when a circuit goes down, a backup one takes over.  We explored the difference between redundancy and diversity in a blog post earlier this year. But even if you utilize redundant connections—including services from different network providers—you may not be gaining anything in terms of reliability. Even connections from different carriers may still be using the same building entrance and/or underground cable  path and be vulnerable to the same single point of failure—whether it’s a cable cut, a construction mishap, a natural disaster or a cyber attack. So even with multiple providers and multiple connections, your business is still not fully protected.

True network diversity means having independent network paths that route between the same location without sharing any common points of failure.  But as you can imagine, achieving this type of network diversity is a challenge. Many carriers may not even realize what vulnerabilities they share with other providers.  And now the Cloud further highlights the need for network diversity, particularly for businesses that relying on virtualized services for backup and data recovery, or companies with remote workers using cloud services to access businesses systems, apps and data.

Advantage has helped hundreds of clients achieve true network diversity. We work with 150+ network providers, some of which offer innovative connectivity using satellite and wireless networks.  We’ll figure out whose networks overlap, and whose don’t, and what solutions will best address your needs and concerns. Let us know how we can assist.