How to do Business When an Internet Connection Fails
How do you do business when an internet connection fails? By using your other internet connection of course! When we ask our clients how vital a reliable internet connection is to their business, the answer is usually somewhere between “important” and “absolutely critical”.
The simple truth is that without an internet connection, most businesses would be OUT of business.
When you consider the move of so many business applications to the cloud and the increasing popularity of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for phone calls, it’s not hard to understand why. And yet, we find that very few business professionals consider the cost of internet downtime when selecting a connection, nor do they fully understand the options available to help insure against downtime.
Many business owners report that their employees cannot perform their jobs at all during an internet outage. In order to calculate the cost of internet downtime, let’s say the average cost of an employee (hourly wage + benefits + all other overhead expenses) is $60 per hour. That equates to $1 per minute per employee, which is likely on the low end. Next, let’s imagine that your business internet connection is down for 2 hours, and you have 20 employees who cannot work. The total cost of this outage is $2,400.
This substantial yet realistic cost doesn’t even factor in lost sales and diminished confidence from customers and prospects.
Simply replacing your current internet connection with the most reliable connection available is not the end of the conversation though. Even a high-reliability connection from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) boasting a 99.99% up-time still allows for approximately 53 minutes of downtime per year. So…what if your business used two internet connections in order to diversify?
The concept of a dual internet connection configuration is a recent one, spurred by the migration to the cloud of critical business services like Office 365, Salesforce, etc. The simple illustration below shows the dual internet connections that your office Local Area Network (LAN) can use to get to the internet, supposing that one connection suffers an outage:
When connected to a firewall configured for automatic failover, when one connection fails, traffic simply re-routes through the surviving connection until the trouble is resolved. In an ideal dual connection configuration, each connection would be provided by different ISPs so an issue with one ISP or the other won’t stop your business operations. The second connection acts as an insurance policy against lost productivity, and this is the rare type of policy that will pay for itself quickly.
For more information, use the form below to contact one of our Communications Technologists today, or call us at 763-797-7900!
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