Downtime costs businesses more than $300K per hour, according to their own accounts. That’s up 32% in hourly downtime costs over the last seven years. Preventing internet disruptions is a priority for many organizations. Internet reliability boils down to three main factors: The quality of the network providing your service, the resiliency of your service, and cybersecurity.
In terms of the quality of service your network is providing your business, it’s not just how often you’re hit with a complete outage. What’s more likely to happen on a regular basis are slowdowns and packet loss. These occur when data transmission is not happening in the timely, smooth, consistent flow needed. These delays experienced with video conferencing (like Zoom or Teams), phone calls with voice over IP, running internet-based applications, or disrupted access to the Cloud can all result in costs to the organization. The cost to your organization goes up when your internet connectivity goes down or slows down.
Fortunately, there are performance-enhancing solutions to help mitigate the risks of costly internet slowdowns and outages.
Dedicated Fiber Optics for High-Quality Service
With symmetrical speeds up to 100 Gbps, dedicated fiber internet connectivity can mitigate or even eliminate productivity losses and the resulting costs that can come from slow network performance.
Shared networks, or over-subscribed networks, are often found in services delivered by cable companies and can result in contention on the network. The traffic from numerous customers is pushed through aggregation points which can result in service slowdowns. For example, if numerous customers in a local geographic area, like a city block, are all running bandwidth-intensive applications, this could result in contention on the network and slow down all users.
Organizations seeking fast, reliable, and resilient connectivity should choose dedicated fiber-optic connectivity. With bandwidth allocated solely to your organization, you will not have to contend with other customers for internet performance. Additionally, fiber is not as sensitive to moisture and temperature fluctuations, which can interfere with connectivity, nor is it sensitive to interference from electronic or radio signals yielding a higher level of security than with shared internet.
High Availability Service Design
High availability service design may be the answer for your business to mitigate the impact of network failures like cable breaks and equipment failures. It is designed and engineered into the network by your service provider. This concept relies on redundancy at the different parts of the service delivery so that if one path suffers a catastrophic failure, the secondary path continues to function normally.
Working with a service provider that is an expert in high availability means that not only will they design redundant delivery, but they will also engineer the redundant services into their network to ensure true dual paths to the internet. A real high availability solution includes dual electronics at the service location, dual, diverse network cables to the service location, and dual, diverse service paths through the provider’s network back to the internet.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is necessary to protect against malicious attacks that can negatively impact your organization at every level. Recently, the global pandemic contributed to a 42% spike in security hacks and data breaches. Every second lost to disrupted services can harm your organization’s finances and your brand’s reputation.
A DDoS Protection solution can shield your network from a volumetric DDoS attack that can bombard and immobilize your connection to the internet. DDoS protection automatically identifies and re-routes suspect data away from your network so that it can be cleaned and analyzed and then delivered cleanly without disturbance to your business. Its proactive detection, mitigation, and alert mechanisms are essential to protect your internet connectivity.
Visit lightpathfiber.com for more information.
