Large networks, distributed sites, and remote teams are common realities for most enterprise businesses. For each of these scenarios, a solution for reliable and agile Wide Area Networks (WAN) is vital to maintaining successful and efficient operations.
Over the past decade, the business world has experienced a revolution in networking capabilities, especially in managing distributed locations that enable any size of business to have a network that has performance, reliability, and ease of management. By implementing these advanced networking tools, companies have been able to create services and products such as cloud gaming, video conferencing, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, dynamic internet of things networks, smart manufacturing, and much more. For many connected organizations, any disruption to the network could stop operations, revenue, and beyond.
Unfortunately, there are a number of both avoidable and unavoidable circumstances that can lead to network failure. In addition, many businesses still maintain networks that are quite vulnerable to disruption in one or more forms. These interruptions can lead to a disruption of services for both end users and intra-business communication between separate sites over a WAN.
What causes network failure?
Unfortunately, there are many ways a network, especially WANs, can fail either persistently or intermittently, including line damage, hardware failure, and power loss. Read on to learn more about some of the most common reasons for network errors.
Configuration errors
As networks grow, IT personnel are required to configure and manage all of these devices. Over time, errors such as misconfiguration of network devices or even just pulling the wrong wire can occur with regularity. It’s not hard for someone to make a simple mistake and fix it, but it can become debilitating if that mistake brings down an entire branch network or shuts off services to a region for more than a few minutes.
Line damage
When a business relies on communication lines from internet providers to handle their connections between sites, those lines become a calculated risk to the business. Whether through human damage (such as a car accident taking out a pole) or through natural causes (such as a storm damaging lines throughout a region), wired networks are susceptible to failure at any point along the line path. This has led to a broader move toward Wireless WAN.
Sudden hardware failure
Devices can fail, and hardware wears out over time. As networks grow, unless redundancy is built in from the very beginning, failure of any device in that network can cause either partial or total network failure.
Intrusions
There are many malicious actors in the world, and many networks are susceptible to malicious actions that overload a network and bring the whole thing down.
Support network failures
Any distributed network that relies on the hardware of another company is reliant on that company's services remaining stable. Should their hardware fail, your network will, too. Even if a network utilizes wireless networking features, it may still be susceptible to network errors at critical points such as cell towers.
Power loss
Even in the most heavily developed and advanced cities in the world, power failure is not an uncommon occurrence. In many parts of the world, partial or total power failure is a regular nuisance. Networks lacking in redundancy and emergency power solutions will find that their business is ultimately beholden to the reliability of power distributors.
Traffic spikes
Perhaps the most common cause of network failure apart from human error, spikes in traffic can overwhelm a network that isn’t prepared or scalable. These network errors can disrupt business across multiple sites if the failure hits a critical location or network.
Avoiding and minimizing network failure
Cradlepoint products and services are made to build resiliency, redundancy, and security into enterprise networking using cellular broadband and purpose-built equipment. The following are some of the ways that Cradlepoint can help your networks become more resilient and avoid single points of failure.
Diverse linkages
By maintaining a diversity of linkages to a remote site, companies avoid losing their connections because of the failure of a single link. Cradlepoint devices utilize LTE and 5G cellular capabilities that can be used together to provide more than a single connection, combined with a wired connection to the same device, or it can act as a dynamic backup device to an existing wired router.
Dual carrier connectivity
Utilizing wireless cellular connectivity still presents the problem of single linkage vulnerability. So Cradlepoint hybrid routers can use two separate modems to connect using different carriers, guarding against connection failure on either carrier network.
Hardware redundancy
Through virtual router redundancy protocol and the usage of multiple Cradlepoint routers, automatic failover is instant and seamless to prevent any WAN failure or connectivity issues.
Multiple DMVPN tunnels
No matter where sites are located, Cradlepoint routers can set up secure Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) connections to multiple data centers to act as primary and backup connections in the case of any head-end device failure.
Dynamic resource scaling
Cradlepoint endpoints are capable of maintaining and activating backup connections to spread traffic load so as to not overwhelm any single point in a network. Then, when the traffic spike has passed, the normal network setup is restored.
Out-of-Band Management
When a device goes down due to a firmware or hardware failure, in-band management becomes impossible. Cradlepoint backup adapters provide a control interface that can act independently of the failed device, allowing remote personnel to perform testing of the failed device and fix issues without needing to access it physically.
Where to learn more
Cradlepoint is leading the world in LTE and 5G networking solutions that can solve these problems for organizations in every market and every industry. Cradlepoint routers and adapters are made to tackle the causes of network failure and persistent network problems, then solve them through clever usage of LTE and 5G edge networking technologies. Take our connected enterprise assessment to discover how your organization can utilize the future of wireless.