Why your business needs a continuity plan

These days, multi-site businesses rely heavily on their WAN (Wide Area Network) that connects multiple offices together and to the internet.  So it’s critical to have a business continuity plan that allows the business to continue in the event of a WAN failure.

Service outages are inevitable

Most businesses rely on an internet service provider (ISP) to provide their WAN links. For this discussion, it doesn’t matter if the ISP is delivering the link over a private IP infrastructure or over VPNs on standard internet connections.

Regardless of which ISP a business uses, outages are unavoidable. These could be caused by natural disasters, security breaches, building fires, equipment failure, or a long list of other reasons. No ISP in the world can guarantee their service will never be affected by any of these events. Even paying top dollar for protected services, businesses will still find themselves affected by outages at some stage.

The gaps in Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Most ISPs will offer an SLA (Service Level Agreement). SLAs only guarantee nominal financial reimbursement and do not guarantee that a company’s sites will remain up and running during a disaster. Therefore, it remains in the hands of the business to protect its vital assets and to ensure the resiliency of its WAN infrastructure. To ensure business continuity, the risk and cost from ISP link outages must be addressed.

Remember:

• SLAs do not guarantee up-time (they only stipulate reimbursement if up-time requirements are not met)

• SLAs usually only reimburse customers for the cost of the prorated connectivity that was lost.

This is why it is important for businesses to develop and implement a business continuity plan.

Setting up redundancies

One of the first things that can help with outages is having redundant services put in place for the critical links in the WAN.

There are a couple of ways to implement redundant services.

1. Same bandwidth

One way to set up a redundancy for your business is to implement a second service. This second service would have the same amount of bandwidth available and would automatically kick into action in the event that the primary link fails. This method can be very expensive as, for the most part, you’re essentially paying for something that may never be used.

2. Less bandwidth

Another way to set up redundancy is to implement a second service that has a smaller amount of bandwidth available but still allows for essential services to continue. This will be more cost effective, but your business continuity plan needs to say exactly which services will run over this lower bandwidth service, otherwise, if the business continues to try to run all of its applications and services over this link, it will not be effective and the lower bandwidth service will come to a grinding halt.

A continuity plan is critical

Multi-site businesses need to have a solid business continuity plan, and if lower bandwidth redundant services are implemented, they need to be referenced in the business continuity plan along with which applications are essential to keep the business moving.