Today’s companies rely heavily on Internet or cloud-based services for everything from telephony and email to billing, inventory management, customer relationship management, training and more. With many employees working remotely, organizations are leveraging Software as a Service (SaaS) more and loading less onto their local servers. Dual Internet strategies have gone from “nice to have” to essential.
This is particularly true for businesses with multiple locations. Regardless of the geographic spread of an organization, employees need online access to the mission-critical resources that keep company processes humming along – and simply can’t do their jobs without them. If the Internet connection goes down, so do business services, and productivity grinds to a halt.
So what does this mean for network infrastructure? It’s no longer enough to have a single Internet connection feeding an office. Especially in the case of organizations that rely on SaaS and other cloud-based services, provisioning multiple communication links from multiple providers is now an essential part of their technological infrastructure. If one carrier is having a bad day and their service drops, you must have a secondary line onto which outbound and inbound traffic can fail over. This is also true for some remote workers, such as company executives. They need never down internet access to their homes offices.
Why multiple carriers?
Even the most reliable telecommunications providers acknowledge some probability of service disruption. Most public broadband Internet providers do not offer any service level guarantees. Unless your property is hit with a major disaster, it’s unlikely two providers will experience service issues at the same time. By leveraging two or more providers, organizations mitigate the risk of an outage or intermittent service disruptions. Redundancy and automatic link failover, provided by an intelligent WAN link controller, should be a critical piece of every organization’s business continuity planning, as well as a key to optimizing daily performance.
Leverage the standby line for more bandwidth
Most businesses are discovering that by moving applications and services to the cloud to increase IT efficiency, they need additional network bandwidth to ensure proper application performance. It doesn’t do much good to launch a cool new initiative only to have it creep, crawl or crash. Network World noted that many branch offices have less average bandwidth per user and per simultaneous user than the average person has available in their home or on their smartphone.
Adding a second (or third) communication link not only addresses the need for failover, it adds much needed bandwidth. Managing multiple connections with an intelligent WAN link controller allows an organization to spread its Internet traffic and user applications across all the communication links and use all the available bandwidth. In the event one line fails or suffers unacceptable disruptions, traffic is automatically moved from that line to the better performing lines until service is restored.
An increase in Internet bandwidth and automatic failover to a secondary link ensures that staff members can carry out their online processes without interruptions and without delay.