On Friday July 8th an estimated 14 million customers were impacted by a widespread Rogers outage that interrupted wireless, cable and internet services across the country. The outage lasted throughout Friday’s business day and for some customers, continued over the weekend and beyond.
The experience wasn’t the same for everyone
While millions found their ability to work completely disrupted, for some businesses, getting connectivity back was as simple as swapping a network cable from one device to the other. For others, there was no downtime as their systems automatically flipped over from one provider to another. These businesses were prepared for this situation – and you can be too.
How to prepare to overcome an outage
Having redundancy built into your network can be critical for businesses to maintain operations – and certainly would have helped out during the Rogers outage.
In the wake of July 8th, many businesses are eager to protect against another outage by subscribing to a secondary connectivity provider. But before you jump into a contract, here are our top tips for redundant internet service provider:
- You don’t need to work with the telecoms directly – in fact, you probably shouldn’t. There are partners (including Able One) who are experts in multi-telecom arrangements for clients. Working with a partner instead of the telecoms directly can get you a better rate, centralize your contracts and payments, avoid unnecessary upselling, and give you access to more expertise to properly implement multi-carrier redundancy solutions and help you meet your redundancy goals
- Setup matters. Countless organizations have been failed by their investment in redundancy because of the setup. In many cases, the organization has two carriers, but they both come through the same conduit. The result is the same as having one carrier and provides no solution in the event of an outage
- Carefully consider requirements for flipping between carriers. There are two general options for switching to a redundant carrier – passive redundant which happens automatically, or redundancy that requires manual intervention to flip between. There are pros and cons to both approaches. Be sure to seek consulting from your provider on this decision to make the right one for your organization.
- Don’t forget, your people need a plan. Whether you go automated or manual, make sure that procedures and plans are clearly defined, agreed to, and communicated to your IT team, other stakeholders and affected parties to ensure your redundancy solution works as expected when you need it
- Connectivity is just one part of the puzzle. Continue reading below.
A connectivity outage isn’t the only risk to mitigate
The recent outage is just one example of an number of common “disasters” that businesses need to be prepared to deal with. While all eyes are on connectivity right now, let’s not lose sight of the fact that an issue with your firewall would have the exact same effect on your organization as the outage. Or a ransomware attack could take you hostage for much longer than one day.
Our advice: while this incident has everyone’s attention, now is the right time to lead conversations on your organization’s resilience. If you’re an IT Manager, this is the perfect example to point to to justify budget for redundancy and disaster recovery solutions. If you’re an executive, it’s time to understand and validate that your organization is prepared for a disaster:
- Do you have a sufficient backup infrastructure to run on in the event that your primary is unavailable?
- How do you switch over to that redundant infrastructure? Is it automated? Is it manual?
- Who’s going to make the switch?
- How long is it going to take them? How long with it take for systems to be restored?
- How will your operations be affected? What processes need to be upkept in the event of a limited operational capacity situation?
Disaster recovery planning is important – and of course, Able One is always here to help. We have expertise and cost-effective solutions for all of your Disaster Recovery, redundant carrier, and other IT needs. Click below to request a free consultation.
