Why a Business Needs a Back-Up Internet Connection?

The risk of being offline costs more money than you can imagine.

Internet downtime is a reality of the modern world and it can be a big disruption for businesses and consumers alike. We know it happens daily, somewhere in the globe.

There are aspects of connectivity that we can control and there are multiple factors that are not in our hands. Since our reliability on internet connectivity is at the pinnacle at the moment, imagine if the connection is lost. What happens to a business when the primary source of connectivity is broken.

1. Loss of Productivity: When the internet connection is not there, it slows down the business and brings it to a total standstill, costing you an enormous amount of money per minute.

2. Financial Loss: The result of being offline will cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars depending on your business, in terms of the sales missed and the potential clients lost.

3. Customer Service Failure: People do not just buy products, they buy an experience and if anything goes wrong, they should be able to connect with the businesses and get the issues fixed as soon as possible. If the connectivity is hampered, this adds to the bad customer experience and might cost a few crucial customers to the business.

4. Stress and Chaos: How much one needs to stress over getting the connection back up! This not only is a source of anxiety, but we are also answerable to people who might not understand the technicalities involved and might want to get the issue fixed as soon as possible.

Why does the internet go down?

There are multiple reasons why the internet might suffer, and most of it is not controllable. For those businesses reliant on only one source of connectivity, they run the risk of being affected the most in these events.

· Weather Events: Snowstorms, Hurricanes, Torrential Rains, and many other natural phenomena can adversely affect connectivity. Internet outage due to power failure is a common issue in most parts of the world.

· Service Provider Failure: At times, the servers go down from the service providers, bringing their subscribers to a standstill and there is nothing that one can do other than wait for them to establish the connection.

· Equipment Failure: Your own equipment might malfunction that might take hours to fix. This can be mitigated if we have a backup or a redundant internet connection.

· Network Congestion: AT certain times of the day or on certain days where the traffic is too much, the congestion on the line can affect your business by making it slow and that will eventually fail the monetary transactions because of security reasons. In case you have a backup of connection, you can safeguard yourself because you will have % uptime.

· Solar Flares: Space weather, though insignificant to naked eyes, can be a sour e of internet disruption. Since events like that mostly come unannounced to the public, one has to be ready for the worst-case scenario.

What is internet backup?

Backup internet secures the redundancy to the business systems. It is not wise to place all of your eggs in the same basket, hence, having a Plan B works to the advantage of any business in case the primary internet connections suffer momentary or transient dysfunction.

Keeping an internet backup will not affect the established high-speed connection. While installing a backup connection, try to invest in types of equipment that differ from the ones being used in your primary one.

For the business using fiber optical, they can keep a cable-based connection to serve as the backup in time of the need. Please note that the backup system should not cost you more than the primary connection.

This is like a dual sim mobile. If the internet on one sim goes down, you can always rely on the other sim to keep you connected.

How does internet fail-over work?

Internet fail-over is the automatic rollover from the primary source of the internet to the backup in an event of failure. This happens automatically.

A major power outage can cause a major internet outage.

The redundant system should have a backup power source of their own since you do not want both of the equipment to be latched on the same power source, which might fail the whole idea in the first place, For small businesses, this can be a battery generated backup to ensure that whatever happens to the main source your backup internet will not let you have any downtime.

Backup power supply to all the user machines in the office is a good setup in case the power outage is rampant in your area.

Calculations of the cost of internet outages.

Start by calculating how much downtime costs your business for every hour that your internet connection is down.

· Revenue. You can find this out by multiplying your sales average by the average number of sales per hour.

· Productivity. How many of your employees can’t work when the internet is down? Be sure to include any time IT staff spends managing the crisis and repairing the damage instead of performing their regular tasks.

· Customers owe you money. Also include any fees imposed by service-level agreements, as well as any possible government fines. Divide the cost per outage by the number of hours to get an hourly rate.

· Hidden Cost: There are costs that are not disclosed. Are there any outside consultants you’ll be hiring in order to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again? To complete customer orders or to catch up on work in some other capacity? Exactly how much does it cost you to lose data? Distill the total hidden costs per interruption into how many hours it lasted.

If you add them all up, you’ll get the cost per hour of an internet failure. Lastly, don’t forget about non-cash expenses. Chaos and stress will drive good employees to seek employment elsewhere, and customers who are frequently unable to place orders with you will go to someone else.

And now consider if it will cost you less to have a backup internet connection for your business.

Different between online and offline backup?

Online and offline backup refers to the data backup where your information is stored. It is important to ensure that the internet backup and data back-ups are protected. Internet outages can severely affect the online backup of information.

Offline backup of information is to locally store data on internal or external storage devices. It is not dependent on internet connectivity.

Conclusion

If you’re still unsure if you need Internet backup, it’s always a good idea to contact a professional for assistance. These professionals will be able to help you decide which Internet backup solution is right for your company. We hope we have provided you with a few ideas on how you can stay up and running during those unfortunate instances of downtime. Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

~ Deepansh Pratap