Got an SLA on your network? Great, but you need redundancy too.

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Got an SLA on your network? Great, but you need redundancy too.

Hi all,

This month has been a real anomaly for unscheduled network outages across a range of carriers and service providers. Not only that, but the network support technicians are spread really thin as they’re working through the backlog of new year’s service provisioning tickets. What this all adds up to is if a service breaks, it’s taken substantially longer than usual for a resolution this month.

What does this mean to you, you might ask – I’ve got a 99.95% SLA (service level agreement) on my connection, they promised! This is all well and good in theory, but the general fine print to these contracts is that you’re entitled to a refund of the prorated amount of time the service was down for, over and above the SLA. If you have a site down for two days, you might get a $100.00 credit on your next bill – that’s hardly going to make up for the potential lost business and staff productivity loss. Thankfully, these outages are few and far between (that’s something else you’re paying for), but when they do happen they can be excruciatingly frustrating.

 

So what should you do?

We recommend having a plan, and the required equipment and services to deal with a network service outage. This can be as simple as hotspotting your smartphone, or as complex as a fully redundant network with automated failover – there isn’t a one size fits all implementation. The important take away is to have a plan, whether this is a standalone plan or part of a wider disaster recovery plan.

We’d love to drop by and talk about this in detail, so please get in touch network outages cost your business.

About the author

Eden has over a decade of experience in the IT industry. Working with numerous organisations from a diverse range of industries; education, finance and renewable energy to name a few.

Prior to joining Intuitive IT Eden worked at a top tier Managed Services provider which gave him valuable experience in a wide array of enterprise level technologies and customer environments.