Why should I care?

As your business grows and more of your workflow is moved to online apps in the cloud, you might not realize how much of your business that does not work without internet.

This is where WAN failover can become an essential part of your network to keep your company running.

Online

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Stay connected to the internet!

Productive

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Be productive!

Make money

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Keep making money!

A few questions you could ask yourself, to figure out if you should care or not are:

Does my accounting software work without internet?
Can I send and receive emails without internet?
Do I share documents across my company using cloud services?
Does my critical backup work without internet?
Can I play music at my company location without internet?

If you want to learn how you can fix these, please read on :o)

Definitions

  • WAN: Wide Area Network – traditionally what we think of as “The Internet”

  • Failover: An additional internet connection that is switched to automatically in case the primary internet connection goes down or becomes unstable (depending on the rules inside your router)

  • Network resource: It can by any service or device your users engage with over your network. Can be printers, servers, storage, cameras etc.

  • ISP: Internet Service Provider, it is a general term that defines the company who delivers the internet connection to you. They can be both focused on Home users or business customers, usually offering a lot of different features and services in many price brackets.

  • 3G / LTE: Two different generations of Internet connectivity using a mobile network. LTE (also marketed as 4G) is generally faster than 3G.

  • Redundancy: Redundancy is a factor when designing systems that require a high uptime, where downtime is either not acceptable or too expensive for a company. You would generally design redundancy to match a Service Level Agreement (SLA) target, as moving past 99,9% uptime can be expensive.

  • Agnostic: Not tied to the products of a specific manufacturer or service provider.

Do I need it?

It is all about mitigating risk / downtime and deciding if it makes sense for you and your company economically.
There are naturally costs associated with implementing and maintaining WAN failover, so you must calculate if it is worth it for you.

Many people do not think about the cost of downtime and how it scales quickly with multiple employees / customers accessing the internet or your network resources.

Is it worth it?

Does your workflow and security policies allow for other means of connecting to the internet to use your apps and continue working?

If the answer to the above question is no, then how many people would be unable to perform the tasks you pay them to do if your internet connection goes down?

In a lot of cases the cost of having WAN failover to allow for basic functionality is far lower than having just 1 or 2 employees sitting idle doing nothing + it breaks their workflow, which we all know is both inefficient and can cause stress (https://interruptions.net/literature/Baethge-WorkStress13.pdf)

What would that cost you in lost productivity?

How does it work?

WAN failover is usually designed to be completely “invisible” to the users of the network. If your primary internet connection goes down, your router would automatically reroute your internet traffic out through another WAN interface, to ensure that your users are always connected to the internet.

The access technologies you need depends entirely on the scale of your company and how much data your need to keep operational until your primary internet connection is working again.

Most smaller companies can get by fine with a failover solution which uses the mobile network with some GB included in the subscription.

Many vendors today support WAN failover as a standard feature that just needs to be configured and either have a USB dongle and SIM card plugged in.

Some of the higher end equipment (Cisco, Juniper etc), have integrated 3G / LTE modems, so you only need the SIM card and the configuration.

In some cases, your ISP can deliver a solution which has built in WAN failover on their mobile network.

ISP solution

An ISP delivered solution is often the cheapest solution, as they automatically script the configuration for every customer who chooses this service and are therefore able to roll it out quickly and easily.

It is mostly a trouble-free solution, where little to no action is required from you during the setup process.

The pros and cons of such solution could be:

Pros

  • Price, it is usually cheap due to automated processes.

  • Trouble-free setup, your ISP handles and are responsible for everything.

  • You only have one place you need to call when you have issues with your internet.

  • The amount of equipment required, is limited to the equipment your ISP delivered – keeping the space requirement and electricity cost down.

Cons

  • The amount of data included on the fail over (when using mobile WAN failover), might not last you for long and might cause your connection to be throttled within hours.

  • If your ISP has an issue deeper within their core network, your failover might not work as you are on the same ISP for both connections.

  • If your router lives either inside a data center or protected location, WAN failover on mobile, might not work properly due to low signal strength of the mobile network.

  • It is a general configuration, that either cannot be or is expensive to tailor to your needs.

  • You usually do not get additional hardware, so in case of a hardware failure of your ISP router, you do not have other means of internet connectivity.

  • You will not have the option to stay connected to the internet if you need to change ISP for whatever reason.


You must therefore weigh if that solution is optimal for you.

ISP agnostic solution

Should you choose to have a setup tailored to your needs, you gain a lot of benefits, but at a slightly increased cost.

We believe that it is much wiser to choose an ISP agnostic solution from a risk management point of view.

There are obviously pros and cons with both solutions, so again you must weigh those and choose the solution that works best for your requirements and is within your budget.

Pros

  • You are free to choose which ISP you want for the failover connection. This enables you to build better redundancy as you should not be affected by core network issues at your primary ISP.

  • You can choose a mobile data package which suits your needs.

  • You get additional hardware, so in case of a hardware failure of either of the internet connections, you will not be without internet and can continue operations.

  • The solution can be tailor made, specifically for your needs.

  • You can move the modem part outside the building to get the best possible signal strength from the mobile network operator you choose.

Cons

  • It is undoubtably more expensive than just getting a standard solution from your ISP, but it might not be as expensive as you think

  • You get more hardware, which takes up more space and uses more electricity

  • There is a bit more management required to keep multiple devices secure.

  • The solution can be complicated at implementation (compared to an ISP solution).

  • You need to either monitor it yourself or get your IT partner to do it for you.


All the cons are, in our opinion greatly outweighed by the pros for the ISP agnostic solution.
It provides a much better solution from a design and redundancy standpoint – with much more freedom and configurability.

How can Glavind IT help?

Within the area, we offer the following:

  • Consulting

  • Design

  • Implementation

  • Monitoring

You can also make use of our experience to sit in during sales meetings with prospective suppliers to help evaluate their options, so you do not end up with a solution that is too expensive or lacking future expandability features.

Give us a call, let us help you

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