Businesses rely on private networks and the internet to communicate with their customers, store data, and use applications.
Many businesses hesitate to deploy business continuity solutions, preferring to hope that a failure won’t happen to them. Some service providers don’t provide the best advice, advising customers to buy both their network connections (whether dedicated or internet-based) and their automatic failover solution from the same service provider.
The Cost of Network Downtime
In July 2022, one of Canada’s major network providers suffered a catastrophic failure. Their entire network was out of service, across Canada, for an entire day, with some customers still being out of service for the following days. As that outage showed, not having a well-designed network with redundant connections from multiple service providers can be a big problem.
- 25% of Canada lost internet connectivity,
- Over 12 million subscribers were affected,
- Interac was offline nationally, preventing all businesses, regardless of ISP, from accepting debit payments,
- Public parking, public bicycle services, and other public services in Toronto could not process payments,
- Fire alarms and sprinkler systems in Toronto area public buildings were not monitored,
- Federal government services including the Canada Revenue Agency were offline.1
According to Mike Millar, Principal at Netview Consulting Inc., in Mississauga Ontario, the situation that these businesses and organizations found themselves in was avoidable.
“We have been telling customers for years that they need to have separate Internet connections from different providers. This was proven with July’s outage that a proper high availability plan is not only a good thing- it is a must-have. An Internet link with a backup wireless connection from the same provider does not provide redundancy in times of a major outage.”
Minimize Downtime with Netview and Turnium
Using multiple connections from multiple Internet Service Providers (ISP) is possible and practical when deploying using Turnium’s SD-WAN platform. Turnium’s platform delivers Software-Defined Wide Area Network services, allowing a single logical or virtual network to be built over top of multiple physical networks. This includes wireline and wireless connections!
Turnium’s platform enables Netview to provide its customers with a high degree of redundancy and reliability. Using multiple broadband internet connections from different local providers at each site enables Netview to provide cost-effective, high-bandwidth services to its customers. Customers can even have different providers at all their sites, eliminating the need to negotiate regional or national deals with large carriers. Turnium’s platform aggregates the bandwidth at each site and automatically builds the connections between the sites, data centers, or cloud services. This reduces the time to deploy multi-site networks and reduces testing and troubleshooting as the process is automated.
As Mike Millar says, “Customers having connections from two different ISPs provides resilient and redundant connections to minimize any network downtime. Having Turnium SD-WAN provide that automatic failover and improve performance is worth it. Your other option is to keep paying for a slower backup link that is only utilized a few times a year. Why not get multiple connections and use them all at the same time? It’s way better ROI!”
To learn more about Netview’s offerings, please contact Mike at mikem@nvci.ca! To learn more about Turnium, please visit www.turnium.com.