Resilience - what if?

 If you've made the journey to centralised ‘cloud' services, have you asked yourself what would happen if you lost connectivity? With cloud adoption increasing daily at staggering rates (an estimated 40% growth annually worldwide), security and resilience are arguably two of the most important elements to a company's IT strategy. Yet remarkably, many companies are still not prioritising it.

 Consequences of network failure

 A single outage of just 50 minutes in a year drops network availability down to four nines. Loss of connectivity can have disastrous consequences for your business, whether through lost revenue or loss of goodwill from your customers.

Recently, I spoke with an IT director who proudly told me how a Tier 1 provider supplied two fibre connections, through different ducts, to different PoPs (point-of-presence) so he had what he thought was a 'belt and braces' resilience strategy.  I simply said, "But from the same provider, right?". "Yes", he said. "So what happens if the provider is the issue?", I asked. Silence!

Whatever the reason for network failure, it falls to the service provider to fix the problems. A Tier 1 provider can no doubt provide some compensation following a network outage, via their wonderful SLAs, but how does that help your crippled business during the possible outage? 

The importance of diverse service provision

 Ensuring your business has a broad range of service providers on board is key to avoiding either additional costs or restricting your options to expand further down the line. Suffice to say, the national network from Securus Communications is built with resilience in mind. Our large bandwidth fibre connection and core network runs independently of any single PoP, with access to all the main UK carriers' networks, so the single provider issue doesn't affect our services.

 Without diverse fibre connections, the back-up options are limited: any damage to the underlying cable network, for example, such as during road works, can take out every connection from a Tier 1 provider. In order to achieve full resilience, you need to find a service provider with multiple Tier 1 and Tier 2 carrier options and diverse entry points into your building.

How can Securus Communications help?

Securus offers wide-ranging, national and international coverage centred around a clustered data centre topology. It gives complete autonomy to each data centre, meaning that even the loss of a core data centre will not impact customer services.

Aggregating all the UK's Tier 1 and 2 providers through this core, whilst inter-connecting major international brands, gives coverage to almost anywhere a service is required.

 Using this breadth of coverage and supplier base, Securus can build a solution that will guarantee 100% availability if required, using a wide range of access technologies, from 4G to dark fibre.

 Securus' diverse core network has many benefits, such as:

Through careful design and planning, we've created a network that is intended to handle much more traffic than we are ever likely to see in normal conditions. Our core data centre networks are designed to tolerate the failure of any link or piece of equipment, to achieve our goal of minimising downtime, addressing issues rapidly, maximising solution benefits and heightening the overall customer experience.

 Be prepared for the worst

To accurately gauge the true quality of the services from your carrier provider, it is essential to do your due diligence. It may cost slightly more to deploy a multi-carrier design for additional resilience, but it will ensure that the 'silent realisation' moment doesn't happen!

Whichever cloud strategy you choose, Securus Communications will provide sufficient backup to ensure your connectivity is maintained. We will help you address your specific security and resilience issues, so that you can concentrate on your core business activities with the peace of mind that your network is protected.

For more information on how Securus can help, call Brett Rowe on 0345 128 3457.