Don’t Overlook Inbound Failover in Your Business Continuity Planning

It can happen any time. And these days, it happens too often. Maybe it’s a hurricane tearing down and overloading infrastructure. Or a wildfire. Or the third “thousand-year-flood in a row.” Maybe it’s just a construction crew with a backhoe.

Whatever the cause, your business connectivity flatlines, cutting off your organization from the rest of the world. Your on-site employees can’t access the cloud apps they need to run your operations and serve your customers. But the cost to your business is much higher than that, because the severed connection works in both directions. Suppliers can’t reach your intranet to validate inventory and fill orders, remote employees can’t access databases to do their jobs and customers can’t reach you for help.

All in, the cost of the outage is far greater than direct costs of idle employees. It’s costing you customers and brand reputation, making distributors afraid to recommend you going forward, and leaving you disadvantaged to competitors that are simply open and reachable at a time when your company is suffering an outage.

Fortunately, this hypothetical doesn’t have to be your future. New solutions can deliver affordable business continuity options to keep your operations running and competitors at bay. In fact, since few companies factor inbound continuity into their own business continuity plans, you can be in a stronger position than your competitors when an outage takes down an entire region.

 

New Tech for a New Age of Business Disruption Threats

The world is several years into meteoric adoption rates for SD-WAN, and there are no signs of uptake slowing down anytime soon. That’s for good reason, since SD-WAN can help businesses on the security, financial, operating and other fronts. Of course, the big “other” in “other fronts” is business continuity, where SD-WAN’s role in failover protection  is critical to business continuity planning.

The mantra “not all SD-WAN solutions are created equal” has become an almost cliché statement for providers with leading-edge SD-WAN solutions. But that doesn’t make it any less true. SD-WAN flexibility is vital, not just for optimizing current resources and ensuring that your failover solution actually work when you need them to, but in areas that many businesses overlook in their business continuity and disaster recovery planning—inbound failover.

Without inbound continuity, inbound traffic is limited to one connection. This means if the primary circuit drops, external sources can’t reach your site or VPN.

 

Cloud Dependence is Raising Redundancy Awareness

Every day’s a cloudy day for today’s businesses, and that’s a good thing. Cloud services have revolutionized business operations, delivering redundancy, always-updated solutions, scalability and, of course, the OpEx vs CapEX benefits that finance departments love. Extra attention to business continuity – particularly on the network side – has accompanied that adoption—and for good reason.

Way back in the olden days (you know, like, three years ago), when a company’s Internet connections went down, it was an inconvenience to the operation, but since mission-critical software was run on desktops or from on-premise servers, most company operations could continue. In today’s cloud-centric world, where even your telephone solution is an app, downtime can be devastatingly costly. So, businesses large and small have started to pay attention to terms that only their IT departments and people who wore pocket protectors in school previously cared about (or even knew), like “network redundancy,” “failover” and “business continuity.” It’s true…we’re all nerds now.

 

Inbound Failover and Business Continuity Matters, Too

But one area that’s often overlooked by today’s businesses—sometimes with catastrophic consequences – is inbound failover. With inbound continuity, static public IPs are provided between the core network and your gateway to support inbound failover for remote users and web traffic.

The right providers, with the right solutions can protect you from the consequences of inbound failure and protect you from costly outages when your company is hosting websites or applications that customers and employees rely on. Examples include:

  • Web traffic
  • E-commerce transactions
  • Remote employees
  • Supplier intranet access
  • Customer intranet access

 

Wireless Connectivity Gives Inbound Continuity Vital Diversification

Wireless connectivity options like GeoLinks ClearFiber™ offer added diversification protection that’s more resistant to construction accidents and natural disaster outages. In fact, many business and government offices rely on fixed-wireless solutions, which are better than today’s traditional fiber solutions, and then back those solutions with 4G LTE failover protection, for reliable, secure connectivity that, when paired with the right SD-WAN solution, can deliver inbound failover as well.

Military-grade encryption, greater redundancy, lower costs and failover for your inbound, not just your outbound, connections all add up to a solution that’s not just best-in-class, but smart business as well. So, when that fire, flood or backhoe takes all your wireline continuity options, your business avoids that connectivity flatline altogether, saving you productivity, reputation and your customers to boot.

 

Ready to Disaster-Proof Your Connection with Inbound Continuity?

Contact Us Today!

 

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