3 Simple Tips That Will Keep Your Business Connected
On June 15th of this year, T-Mobile experienced a large outage on their network. Immediately after, users started to complain about the lack of service and many news outlets began speculating about the reason for the loss of service. Some thought that it was the result of a denial-of-service-attack in which a server is inundated with queries to the point of not being able to respond. Others indicated that the outage was the result of changes in T-Mobile’s network in preparation for the launch of their 5G network. Ultimately, T-Mobile blamed the problem on an internet traffic issue caused by a fiber circuit failure.
Whatever the reason may be, the outage caused problems to many businesses across the United States. We can imagine what businesses experienced during that day, i.e. inability to reach field personnel, remote workers without internet access, businesses with no emergency access to 911, etc. These issues can give businesses a headache, but should be used to analyze the potentially catastrophic consequences of the highly integrated technology world we live in.
Consider the following: most of us are now contracting for Internet and VoIP telephone services from the same company. Similarly, we obtain our Cloud e-mail from the same company providing us software-as-a-service and data back-up. Which should make us ask the question, ”what would happen to our business if one of these companies was to have a prolonged major outage?”
When we evaluate new technologies for our business, we need to assess how exposed we could be to a single provider, regardless of size, experiencing a similar situation as T-Mobile did. With this in mind, we need to figure out what we can do to keep our business running if and when we lose important services.
Things you can do include:
1. Contract a second internet service from a different provider. This back-up circuit can be smaller than the main circuit but big enough to allow users to access line-of-business applications operating out of servers in the office. A sufficiently smart Firewall should be installed to detect when the main circuit is out and “switch” traffic to the secondary Internet “pipe.”
2. If your line-of-business applications reside in the Cloud, have mobile devices which can be used as hot spots to connect to the internet and gain access to the application. You can take the added precaution of having mobile devices from different carrier.
3. Have at least one land line for your alarm system and to make 911 calls if necessary.
The integration of technology makes it difficult for us to separate networks and services, but at the very least implement strategies to continue operating when one of your services fail.