Identifying the Need for Redundancy: What are We Protecting Against?

Author: James Loder

Today, business is transacted on such a scale that a single second of downtime in a business network can mean millions in lost revenue. As such, an emergence of solutions has recently hit the market aimed at providing redundancy in various aspects of business communications systems (e.g., for sites with poor internet access or those relying on unreliable power due to frequent storms). By combining these solutions for your clients, you can deliver redundancy that guarantees that they never experience a service interruption.

As you partner with your client to help them achieve redundancy, first seek to understand. Start by asking them what they are trying to protect against, whether it’s happened before, and, if so, how they resolved it. The answers to these questions will guide your path in determining which solutions will best meet their needs.

For example, if the client’s primary concern is the redundancy of their PBX in the event of an outage, there are a few factors to consider. The fact is, the only conditions that could cause a 3CX PBX to go down would be if the machine or virtual machine hosting the instance were to fail—which might occur if it was being hosted on-premises on an outdated machine or in a high traffic area.

To avoid this pitfall, your clients would benefit from a hybrid or fully hosted cloud PBX instance. By not having their machine tied to their local site, an unexpected power outage would not cripple the business. Without power, users would still be able to access the 3CX mobile app to make and receive calls.

You might also recommend a high-availability server failover, which would allow your clients’ virtual machine to move to a mirrored instance in another data center. For example, at Telin, we have a data center presence on both the East and West Coast. If something were to happen to the data center on the East Coast, the West Coast data center would recognize the outage within minutes, take over the traffic, and bring service back to the site.

Beyond the machine itself, the other area that can benefit from redundancy is network connection. The vast majority of businesses utilize a business internet connection from a large ISP over a single connection. If that provider experiences issues with their infrastructure, or an upstream provider experiences issues that impact that provider, your client pays the price.

To avoid this scenario, consider leveraging SD-WAN technology that allows for more than one connection to come into a business—with the ability to failover between the connections in the event of any service degradation. Telin partners with Peplink to deliver the SD-WAN by way of the Peplink Speedfusion suite. Providing ultimate redundancy and a suite of network management tools, Peplink Speedfusion offers hot failover that lets you switch between ISP 1 and ISP 2 seamlessly if one connection fails. Plus, with features like WAN smoothing and bandwidth bonding, the Peplink device can intelligently route traffic to the highest quality available paths—all seamless to the user.

It’s only a matter of time before a client experiences an outage of some sort. As they say, “it is better to have and not need, than need and not have.” Help your clients prepare for an unexpected event with redundant business communications solutions.

To learn more about Telin’s SD-WAN capabilities or our telecom grade hosting solutions, reach out to us today!