While network outages are not preventable, extended periods of downtime are avoidable
The cost of downtime continues to torment organizations despite evolving network technologies. Companies experience an average of 501 hours of network downtime every year which, on average, costs 3.6% of their annual revenue according to Infonetics.
As companies adopt digital transformation practices, the importance of maintaining non-stop connectivity to their branch offices and the valuable data grows. The need to preserve connections to critical revenue sources, IoT devices, and cloud-based applications places an even greater significance on a reliable Wide-Area Network (WAN), and on flexible network failover solutions.
What can cause downtime?
Terrestrial accidents are one of the most common causes of a network outage. Construction equipment can unintentionally dig up and cut through an enterprise’s wired network. In this scenario it is common that both the primary link and redundant failover line are cut because they enter the building through the same trench. Additionally, in the event of natural and manmade disasters, it often takes days to restore the connection resulting in a standstill of business.
Network downtime due to misconfigurations and service errors typically are resolved in a matter of hours rather than days. However, this type of outage can impact a wider area of customers. Two major outages occurred in the U.S. northeast that blanketed hundreds of thousands of customers in 2020 alone. Gartner predicts a major outage impacting more than 100 million users for longer than 24 hours within the next 5 years.
Outsmarting the outages
Organizations can avoid outages in their remote offices by building a network failover strategy that includes cellular wireless connections. Why is failover important? Cellular WAN links provide an alternate form of connection to avoid disruption from terrestrial accidents. By building options for connecting to multiple carriers, the best signal can be sourced and maintained during disaster scenarios. Resilient, secure wireless connections automatically link when an outage is detected and reestablish the original connection upon service restoration.
Cradlepoint has built and refined a cellular WAN service dedicated to optimizing uptime in branch locations.
“Our NetCloud logs in 2020 show our customers avoided disruptions from 25 million failover events and 80 million failover hours, resulting in 40 billion of dollar of downtime cost avoidance.”
Through the NetCloud Health Dashboard, customers can track, analyze, and quantify failover events to uncover potential issues. A new failover report demonstrates the amount of downtime savings that can be shared with key stakeholders. NetCloud continually monitors primary and failover links and displays cellular health, and interface uptime to ensure operation readiness. Some customers use primary link performance information from the dashboard to track the service level agreements with carriers. NetCloud Services and the recently introduced L950 Adapter for branch continuity have the ability to perform remote troubleshooting to identify both inline issues as well as root causes of the primary link failure.
The L950 Series Adapter adds higher performance Cat 7 LTE with line rate IP Passthrough to enable more cloud-based and IoT applications to continue working in the event of a primary link outage or to offload unexpected traffic surges. These new sophisticated devices can be configured at scale with NetCloud to offer a full range of zero-touch deployment, management features, and integrate into existing configurations with standards-based routing, traffic shaping, and VPN support.
With these new capabilities organizations now have the ability to avoid network outages and their related costs, gain more visibility into primary and failover link performance, and benefit from higher performance to support more applications.