Do you have a plan for an Internet Outage?
Think about the country of Canada. Earlier this year, business ground to a halt in an instant. A botched maintenance update by a large internet service provider (ISP) created chaos for more than 10 million customers.
If your internet goes down, what is your plan?
In most cases, it could be at least three different vendors that you will have to deal with, if you are sorting the problem yourself.
As a customer of IT Centre, we will go through a thorough checklist first to figure out where the problem lies:
IT Centre can deal with all of your vendors, so that you don’t have to coordinate them, and figure out where the problem lies.
Here are some suggestions that can help you ensure you are protected against an Internet outage:
About one-quarter of Canada’s internet capacity was offline. The downtime lasted only 12 hours for some, days for others. The list of outage impacts is long. The problem halted some point-of-sale payments, some nonprofits lost the ability to serve vulnerable populations, and cellular-dependent traffic signals in Toronto were out of whack.
What can we learn from this? Businesses should prepare a backup.
Setting up a secondary internet connection can help your business remain online. You’ll be ready if there are system issues, intrusions, or power a failure. For this to work, you’ll need to partner with a different provider than you do for your primary internet. This cuts the odds that both your main and backup internet will go down at once.
If your primary internet connection is wired, consider a cellular backup. For example, a router with 4G backup would switch you to that network if the main connection failed.
The very nature of redundancy is that it repeats what you already have. That can make some businesses balk: Why pay twice? Yet internet redundancy can help you avoid lost business, productivity, and brand reputation, not to mention the stress of having to try to do business in this digital age without being able to get online.
Maybe you can’t reinforce your IT infrastructure with a second provider. At least reach out to your current ISP to learn their backup plans. Ensure they have failovers established to back up their systems.
The Canadian outage saw many businesses floundering. With the ubiquity of technology today, it’s not unlikely that more ISP outages will happen. Be ready for the worst with plans for redundancy and contingency plans.
Hopefully, we never experience an issue like Canada did, however it is is best to be prepared. Contact the team if you would like further information.