Why is the Internet vital for business continuity?
Sander Barens
Chief Product Officer
Your business continuity strategy is the key to how you keep your enterprise’s business-critical functions operating in the event of an emergency or disaster. In recent years we’ve seen our fare share of major events that can impact a business; including natural disasters, system malfunctions, data breaches, supply chain disruptions, and health emergencies. The importance of a business continuity strategy cannot be understated.
Today, business continuity in the digital age hinges on having reliable Internet access at all times. However, those cybersecurity risks, system malfunctions and natural disasters we’ve touched upon already are all very real threats to your ability to keep your business connected to the Internet. Interestingly, only 35% of companies can maintain 100% operations during an unplanned IT and Internet outage.
Ask yourself how many of your business-as-usual activities depend on being connected to the Internet? And how many of your business-critical operations also depend on a stable connection? The importance of reliable, high-speed Internet becomes clearer.
Embedding connectivity considerations into your business continuity strategy ensures you can maintain communication, collaboration, and business development activities - no matter what happens!
What impact can downtime have on your business?
No matter what the cause is, the loss of business connectivity can have serious consequences, even for just a few minutes! Typically, power outages or other system-wide failures costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. In concrete terms that downtime can work out to cost an average $2,300 to $9,000 per minute!
Direct costs and opportunity losses aside, there are other ways Internet downtime can impact your business:
1. Reputational loss
A company-wide loss of connectivity can have a significant impact on your customers if access to your sites or services is suddenly unavailable or they are performing poorly. This could cause a loss of confidence in your reliability, potentially leading to customer churn or lost customer acquisitions over the short-, medium- or long-term
2. Decrease in productivity
Internet outages can also hold a business back from reaching its targets due to reduced productivity. Your teams can’t perform their responsibilities if they have to dedicate time and effort to finding a solution or temporarily resorting to more traditional, manual methods.
3. Reduced employee satisfaction
If disruptions occur regularly this can harm employee morale. People can get frustrated with having to work extra hard to resolve connectivity issues and deal with upset customers. This may eventually translate into high staff turnover and rising recruitment costs.
The Internet is clearly vital to ensuring employee productivity and meeting customer expectations. It’s therefore essential that your business has some form of redundancy option to call upon to prevent disruption should an outage occur. Keep reading to see how to deal with a loss of connectivity and the benefits of implementing the right failover solution to ensure business continuity.
How do businesses deal with a loss of connectivity?
Different companies have different connectivity needs that will influence which connectivity solution will best ensure business continuity. For example, fiber may be paired with DSL, wireless broadband, cable or even satellite.
One method that is becoming more popular is to pair 4G/5G/LTE Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) together with broadband or DIA. This is because businesses want a failover solution that offers flexibility as well as technology diversity so they can be confident it will give them the reliability they need.
What makes Internet failover a must-have for business continuity?
The best way of ensuring reliable, uninterrupted connectivity long-term is to put multiple backup systems in place. Fixed Wireless Access is a great solution to include within your connectivity portfolio as it only kicks in when needed. If the fixed connection is impacted, for example, you're still connected.
Once the risk of potential losses from an outage is factored in, the upfront cost of investment becomes easy to justify. Especially in the face of keeping your business-critical functions operational at all times. And reasonably, the limited financial impact of installing Fixed Wireless Access doesn’t compare to the cost of downtime! It's a great solution to include in your business continuity plan.
Introducing: Fixed Wireless Access from Expereo
Expereo’s own agile LTE/4G/5G Fixed Wireless Access solution delivers local wireless network access spanning 190 countries. It provides robust and flexible connectivity when and where needed as well as extending network reach into remote locations and rural areas.
The solution also offers further benefits including:
- A vendor-agnostic SIM that offers a choice of the best networks available at your site and an automatic failover if one mobile network goes down.
- Shared data pools for cost-efficient sharing of data across sites.
- Complete visibility of network health down to site level, from a single login, whenever and wherever you need it.
- Dedicated regional teams with experts to provide support across every location.
- Flexibility and freedom to reach remote locations and sites beyond the reach of fixed lines.
- Capacity to quickly spin up services and locations as, when, and where required to capitalize rapidly on new growth opportunities.
- “Always-on” continuity with technology diversity to ensure robust uninterrupted business at all times.
Of all the wired connections and wireless options for connectivity failover available, Fixed Wireless Access is one of the most reliable and cost-effective in terms of seamless long-term viability.
In summary, business operations today cannot survive without a robust, continuous Internet connection. Any service interruption is costly enough on its own, but the knock-on effects will be felt by customers, employees and the business at large.
Take your global network faster to the future with Fixed Wireless Access
Looking for more information about our Fixed Wireless Access solution? Check out our brochure for more information on how it works, how it could benefit your organization, and how we implement it for you.
If you’re ready to talk to our expert team about your business continuity needs, get in touch today.