Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

Most businesses these days use the internet to some degree. Some have come to rely on email, web based line of business apps, web CRM systems - even web based accounting applications.

So what happens to your business when you don't have an internet connection?

Do you get to carry on as per normal and simply get your email a bit late? Or does your business come crashing to a halt and lose significant sums of money and clients every hour, threatening to end your business activities right there and then?

Or perhaps, similarly to many local businesses, a lack of internet connectivity is not so disastrous that it will kill your business, but it WILL affect productivity, it WILL affect profitability, and it WILL cause some inconvenience to your business partners, suppliers and/or clients, that could make a key difference in the effectiveness and timeliness of your business activities.

In one business I worked for, an internet outage meant 30 well paid staff heading off for a 1 hour coffee break!

Luckily, here in Hawkes Bay, we have some fantastic options to stay connected and get some redundancy. Many businesses already have some diversity available to them, perhaps without realising - for example, if you have a smartphone or PDA, most modern mid  and high end handsets can be used as 3G modems, and with 3G speeds approaching real-world ADSL speeds in some cases, mobile data can quickly and easily serve as an emergency replacement internet connection - either on a single pc/laptop, or piped into your company network, allowing your mail server, web proxy, and other services to continue to allow your employees and systems to stay working. (Please note that most mobile data connections are priced for low to moderate personal use - costs can quickly mount up when the megabytes start flowing!).

This is the kind of thing you really want to do a dry run with, before you need it. A mini-disaster recovery plan, just for your internet connection.

Of course 3G is not the only alternative. With more than one ISP in town offering more than one connection method, you can get diversity and redundancy without having to resort to expensive 1GB or 3GB mobile data plans.

For example, Telecom, TelstraClear, Vodafone, Orcon (and others) all provide ADSL/ADSL2+ (and soon, VDSL) connectivity, and routers allowing failover and load balancing between multiple ADSL connections are cheap, easy to configure, and simply bolt on to existing networks. Though this only makes allowances for outages at the ISPs core or further upstream - a rat chewing through your cable on site, or a major exchange fault is likely going to knock out multiple providers anyway.

How about fixed-wireless? Airnet provide solid, fast & stable connections via their WiMAX wireless network. This totally bypasses the Telecom exchanges, and provides a much more diverse alternative to a second ADSL line.

With Airnet and an ADSL connection into your business, you would be unaffected for the vast majority of internet outages that could affect either Airnet or Telecom (or whichever ADSL provider you roll with).

Failover routers handling two upstream connections can be had for under $1,000, or perhaps you have a server based environment that could already handle two providers plugged in. For the price of one extra standard business internet connection, the ability to continue doing business could quickly outweigh the cost of a redundant connection.

Remember, even 99.9% 'uptime' still equals more than 8 hours of downtime over a year.

What is 8 hours of productivity (across your whole internet-reliant team) worth to your business, and does that exceed the value of setting up a redundant connection? Easy maths!

If you are already a member of the ICT glitterati, then this concept is bread and butter - but how many of you ACTUALLY do it? Of those that don't (I'm betting that that's most of you), how many of you, in hindsight, would have been financially better off, due to to downtime experienced, had you had some redundancy for your internet connection?