It's another normal day at the office with reports zipping around the place and sale after sale hitting the record books. Suddenly tragedy: the entire network for your company goes down. You have to spend all day getting it back online resulting in tons of lost sales and worktime that places your company behind your competitors.
With this sort of downtime costing your business around $5600 a minute you need a solution to this mess pronto. But where can you find one?
Well it's your lucky day because we're here to give you our guide on everything you need to know about network redundancy! Now let's cut the chatter and get right into things!
What is Network Redundancy?
Network redundancy refers to the idea of adding bonus devices to the different communication lines within your network. This is done because networks that lack these "checkpoints" and backup systems only have one point that keeps them running. If that point goes down the entire network falls apart.
High redundancy networks avoid this with multiple backup points. This way you can recover the network much faster when you don't have to rely on one point to keep the entire operation afloat.
So why are so many companies hopping aboard the network redundancy train? Well network outages cost you a lot more than money. Your company looks unprofessional and sloppy when you have to shut down some aspect of your business to reboot the network driving away customers and hurting your public image.
The Two Types of Network Redundancy
The first type of network redundancy your company can use is high availability. This process involves spreading software (like multiple servers) throughout your network. These servers can look at one another and detect the status of their counterparts.
If one network fails the other servers can redirect traffic to themselves. This way the network can keep running (albeit at reduced power until you fix the downed server).
The other type is fault tolerance. Here you take a piece of hardware and put an identical piece next to it. You then make these two run the same programs side-by-side.
Lose one system and the other system takes over removing downtime from the equation altogether.
While fault tolerance does provide more stability than high availability it's also far more expensive and time-consuming to implement in a business (since you have to integrate physical devices into your pre-existing infrastructure). In contrast high availability's reliance on software over hardware makes it far easier to use. You can also use both systems in tandem.
How to Strengthen Network Redundancy
One technique you can use to buff your network redundancy further is to run regular tests of your backup systems and make sure everything is in tip-top shape. This way you can catch errors in the system before they pop up during a real data outage.
You should also make sure you have strong cybersecurity in place to keep your network safe. DDOS (or distributed denial-of-service) attacks for example block you from accessing key parts of a network crippling your systems. Making sure these viruses and cyberattacks don't make it past security will keep your network redundancy systems working safe and sound.
And the Data Keeps Flowing
So now that you have this guide on everything you need to know about network redundancy it's time to let the data flow and kick any fears of downed networks out of your mind. But what if your company needs more assistance with IT matters or on implementing network redundancy into their everyday work?
If that's the case feel free to contact us and let us know how we can help you!
Our technological expertise and extensive experience allow us to work with virtually any system enabling you to meet your specific goals and objectives–no matter how complex they may be. We pride ourselves on offering sophisticated solutions that other smaller IT firms simply cannot offer outfitting your company with a reliable support system as your needs expand and evolve. Alura Business Solutions provide services including but not limited to: Carrier Solutions Bandwidth Solutions Phone Solutions Wiring Solutions Client Access IT Solutions.
