As I write this on Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for family, friends, my health, prosperity, and my redundant Internet connection. Why a second Internet connection? Because as of right now, Comcast, one of four providers in my home down in central Vermont, is having a widespread outage, affecting many of our clients in the northeast. Now, it is Thanksgiving Day, so there’s a good likelihood that most of our clients may not even notice this outage (unless they have Comcast at home and are trying to do some last-minute turkey deep-frying technique research), but downtime and unplanned outages aren’t always kind enough to coordinate their schedules with your time off.
What about when this happens next time? Now your business is offline during prime-time, and you’re losing money. How much are you losing? The costs of downtime are something you should also be able to calculate for your own business, but it’s probably safe to say that it’s more expensive than having a secondary connection would cost you.
What can be done about this outage? Not much. If Comcast is down, your connection through them is down as well, and no amount of complaining will fix this. However, you could have a secondary connection from FairPoint, Charter, RCN, or any number of smaller providers in your area. To take full advantage of a secondary connection, you need to have the appropriate network hardware that supports this feature, such as the Sophos UTM – a product we have carried for several years and use for our own connectivity and protection. If you have redundant connections and properly-configured network hardware, your systems may be down for less than a minute, as the hardware automatically switches to the backup connection without your even knowing there’s a problem, allowing you and your employees to continue to work without significant downtime.
Interested in how you can increase your productivity and reduce downtime? Click “Home” then “Get Info” at the top of the page, and we’ll tell you how we can help.
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