Advantages of a Wireless Business Continuity Plan

Is it true for your business that all that stands between being up and running and dead in the water is one thin line? That line is your vital bandwidth connection. You may be one equipment failure or backhoe accident away from being unable to conduct business.

In the days of paper order pads and medical records, your telecom connections were important, but not necessarily critical. The telephone lines were probably more valuable than the broadband connection. That’s all flipped upside down now. Yes, telephone service is vital to most businesses, but so is that all-important connection to the cloud. Lose it and you’ve lost most of your office functions. After all, everything is in the cloud now. That includes your vital business data and the cloud-based apps that make your office run.

We know that wireline bandwidth connections are highly reliable... but not perfect. What do you do in those rare instances when your line goes dead? Wait it out? For simple equipment outages and line breaks, that might be the logical approach. Chances are that you’ll only lose half to one business day. How much is that worth to you?

If your losses from being down for 4 to 8 hours are minimal because the Internet or private line connection are more of a tool for your business rather than essential to keeping things running, then perhaps you’re fine. In the new model of cloud services, you’ll have more than the mere inconvenience of not being able to update inventory right away. Your entire operation will be dead in the water. For a high volume retail or distribution operation, the losses can mount up quickly. Hundreds? Thousands? How much per day will you lose?

Now, what if you could have an entire year’s worth of backup protection for less than one day’s losses without such protection? Would that be worth it?

Many businesses have multiple wireline services to protect against just such a disaster scenario. With bonded T1 or EoC (Ethernet over Copper), the loss of a single copper pair reduces the available bandwidth, but the connection keeps running. That offers some protection but doesn’t help if the situation was caused by the entire wire bundle being cut by a backhoe digging too near the cable right of way. It also doesn’t save you if the problem is an equipment failure on either end of the line.

This argues for dissimilar connections. One approach is to get your business up and running with copper wireline solutions while you are waiting for a much larger capacity fiber line to be installed. Once the fiber is provisioned, you keep the less expensive copper connection as a backup. There’s a good chance that the fiber and copper don’t share any common terminal equipment or run in the same conduits, preventing a single point failure of both. That’s not always the case, but it does offer some protection compared to having two of the exact same line services.

Another approach is to have a wireless bandwidth service for business continuity. The proliferation of cellular towers with high speed bandwidth channels now means that virtually every business location is in range of at least one and probably several tower sites.

Bandwidths have also greatly increased. Nearly universal 3G service offers speeds similar to T1 lines at 1 Mbps download. The more advanced 4G service is good for 5 to 12 Mbps download and 1 to 5 Mbps upload. That’s fast enough for most small to medium businesses, especially as a backup solution.

The beauty of commercial cellular-based wireless backup is that it is very affordable, with a cost less than half what you pay for a T1 line and installation measured in days rather than weeks or months. The equipment comes already set up to work with the strongest signal at your location. Most companies can install what looks like a WiFi router themselves and be running the same day the gear arrives. The router includes a port for your existing wireline service, T1 or EoC, and offers automatic failover in the event of a wire outage.

Another use for rapidly installed wireless bandwidth is to support newly opened or temporary business sites. This includes new store openings, temporary holiday store locations and construction sites. You can lease the service by the month without a long term commitment.

Do you have a situation where you need connectivity right now and can’t wait for the usual installation times? Are you feeling a bit insecure that you can lose substantial business if your connection fails for even a day? Are you digging out from a recent disaster and need private line or Internet service immediately? If so, you are an excellent candidate for wireless business continuity service. Get pricing and details to see how well this will work for your situation.

Disaster Recovery Is Now a Service

It’s one of those days that’s warm, too warm. The skies are darkening and its eerily quiet. It’s the kind of day when bad things can happen quickly. You don’t have to wait long. The skies quickly darken, the wind picks up and there is a roaring noise that grows louder by the moment. The next sound you hear is the storm sirens going off all over town. You run for cover in the basement storage area where you are protected. Up above, windows shatter and you can hear the wrenching sound of metal being ripped from the roof and sides of the building. Then the chaos dies down and it’s quiet again. You go up the stairs and open the door to see...

What you see is a landscape littered with debris to the horizon. That includes what little is left of your business. File cabinets, computers, server racks, desks and what used to be office walls are strewn in all directions. You spent a decade going into business and a half hour going out of business. Is it even possible to pick up the pieces and keep going?

Every year many long established businesses face this scenario or one of equal consequence. The utter destruction of sudden unexpected disaster knocks them out of business so hard that they just can’t put it back together again. Without some sort of disaster planning, all that critical business information on hard drives, CD-ROM backups, as paper files in thin metal file cabinets and cardboard storage boxes can be annihilated right before your eyes. You have no order records, you have no customers lists, you have no written procedures, you have no tax files, you have no proprietary drawings. Years, even decades of writing, drawing, entering data, making notes and carefully organizing it all vanishes. Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes of digital data representing the sum total of your business knowledge is smashed beyond retrieval. Worse, the cost and time involved in putting it all back in place are too much to bear. It’s time to pack it in.

Does any of that send a shudder up your spine? It should. Unless you’ve put bulletproof disaster recovery processes in place you are vulnerable. At this point it’s just a matter of time before the worst happens. The good fortune that’s smiled upon you up till now might not be there tomorrow... and there’s no way to know when that tomorrow will be. Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to take control now and put measures in place that can ensure the continuity of your business?

The advent of the cloud is creating some opportunities for disaster prevention and recovery that were hard to do previously. For instance, you know that you need copies of everything critical to your business stored in at least two places. Your computer hard drive and the desk drawer with the backup disks isn’t even close to adequate. Smaller companies may choose to have a safe or storage room for backup materials. Larger operations can afford a second data center across town. In the event of a massive tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or fire that devastates an entire city, neither business is protected. They are both wiped out because the disaster claims their primary and backup data.

The nice thing about the cloud is that you can pick a cloud that is located far away. It’s unlikely that any man made or natural disaster is going to wipe out geographically separated data centers at the same time. Certainly it makes sense to backup your electronic data to the cloud, but what if you could replicate your entire electronic operation in the cloud?

This is the service that Windstream is offering with their Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The idea is to replicate your physical and virtual servers in the Windstream cloud. It’s not just a place to go and get new IT resources to replace what you’ve lost. This is a system that shadows your data center operations on a continuous basis. In effect you have a real business operating in-house and a virtual copy running in the cloud. They operate in parallel until something happens that puts your local operation out of commission. Then you pick-up where you left off using the cloud copy of your business. Once you get re-established locally, you sync your new data center with the cloud and your are back in business as if nothing ever happened.

Would you sleep better knowing that your business is protected by a mirror image in the cloud? If this sound like that type of service that you would find valuable, then check out cost and features of disaster recovery as a service for your particular business. It’s the continuity insurance that no paper insurance policy can provide.




Note: Photo of tornado destruction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Tysons Corner Gets Wireless Network Connections

The Washington D.C. area, a center for high technology in the government, military, and business community, has been a focus for XO Communication’s competitive network services. The latest addition to their suite of service offerings is carrier-grade broadband wireless coverage for the Tysons Corner area of Virginia. That includes links in the range of 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps for VoIP, Ethernet, MPLS, IP-VPN and private line services.

Wow. That’s one powerful WiFi hotspot, isn’t it? No, this goes far beyond the capabilities of WiFi. Note the speed range of 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. That’s more than you can expect from WiFi, WiMAX or other wireless services intended for the mass markets. This is LMDS or Local Multipoint Distribution System bandwidth, which is a licensed service in the 26, 28 and 31 GHz microwave bands. If you haven’t heard of LMDS, it’s because this is a very specialized system used for high performance wireless links over distances of a few miles.

What are the advantages of LMDS links? Because they are high bandwidth line of sight connections, LMDS wireless can be used in lieu of both copper and fiber optic lines for last mile connections. This offers a solution to the problem of expensive construction in built-up areas where conduit isn’t readily available or too costly to employ. Even if you have the option to bring in fiber optic cabling, you may not be able to wait for the months long provisioning cycle to complete. As long as there is a clear view of the carrier’s transmitting antenna from your building, it’s relatively fast and simple to install a radio set and antenna and have a signal up and running.

Another use for LMDS wireless links are for network redundancy and business continuity. Even if you have high bandwidth line services, there’s always the possibility that natural disaster or construction activity will cut through a cable and shut off your bandwidth for hours or days. Few operations with the need for high levels of business bandwidth can stand that level of service interruption without a serious impact. By adding a wireless link in addition to your copper or fiber lines, you eliminate a source of single point failure in your network.

XO has been augmenting its extensive fiber optic footprint with wireless network coverage in the greater Washington D.C., including the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Maryland. They can provide service to businesses as far west as Dulles Airport, as far East as Lanham, Maryland, as far North as Rockvill and Beltsville, Maryland and as far South as Mout Vernon, Virginia. XO also operates LMDS wireless links as part of its broadband services in other Metropolitan markets.

Have you been wanting more bandwidth for your business or organization, but concerned about the cost of construction and line leases? With recent network expansion, you may be able to get a lot more bandwidth than you realize. It doesn’t cost anything to find out, so why not get a full set of competitive quotes for voice and data services from XO Communications and other high quality carriers? Who knows, maybe LMDS wireless is the right solution for your company.

TelePacific Takes Business Continuity Seriously

TelePacific Communications, a competitive telecommunications carrier serving customers in California and Nevada, is taking a comprehensive approach to disaster planning and the need for business continuity that follows disasters natural and man-made.

Their Business Continuity Services are focused on maintaining your ability to use voice and data services in the event you lose a trunk line or even your entire facility. But how just how can you do that?

Let’s take a look at telephone first. Most medium and large size businesses, and some smaller businesses that are heavy users of telephone communications, are using digital trunk lines. T1 PRI and SIP Trunks provide one to two dozen outside lines for management by an in-house PBX system. That trunk line offers a considerable cost savings over multiple individual phone lines, but does represent a single point failure risk. With that in mind, you can backup your primary trunk line with a few individual analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines. The key is to have the phone system programmed to automatically switch over to the backup lines when the trunk goes down. Another approach offered by TelePacific is to have your incoming calls automatically forwarded to the backup lines.

Even smaller businesses using IP PBX systems or Analog Telephone Adaptors may keep one analog telephone line in service as an emergency backup. The idea is that a fault that takes out your digital data line may not affect the analog lines. In many cases, that’s true. But what happens if a construction accident cuts all the underground lines in an area or the ground opens up in an earthquake and breaks every wire in the area?

If all your telecom connections are out, you may have also lost power. In that case, TelePacific has the ability to forward your incoming calls to a number at another business location. You could also choose to have your most important numbers, such as your main phone line and FAX number, forward to a mobile phone or even a residence. If there are too many incoming calls for you to answer immediately, the overflow can be answered by voicemail at the carrier’s facility. You then have the option to listen to and return those calls from another location when time permits.

Data lines, such as Dedicated Internet Access, are subject to the same disasters that befall telephone lines. T1 lines are the most popular connections for business users. If all you have is a single T1 line and it goes down, your connection is broken until it is fixed. But bonded T1 lines can be set up so that if you lose one, the secondary or other T1 lines will keep running. Your bandwidth will be temporarily reduced, but you’ll still have broadband connectivity.

Of course, if all lines are cut you will lose data service coming in and going out of your business location. If you have a second business location you can set up a private IP VPN arrangement so that all traffic can be routed to the secondary location. If you have only a single facility or all of your offices are located so closely together that they might all lose power or communications in the same event, you probably want to think about using a colocation service. A carrier colocation facility is probably more robust than your onside data center. The facilities are built with extensive physical security, fire and flood control, and both battery and generator backup. They also have multiple incoming and outgoing trunk lines going in different geographical directions.

TelePacific offers colocation facilities as do other providers around the country. You can house your application servers there and have an email backup server in case your primary email server fails. Remote data storage is a necessity these days since the most important business documents are now electronic documents.

Do you feel a bit uncomfortable with your ability to conduct business in the event of a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake or other unforeseen disaster? If not, it’s worth your time and peace of mind to talk with an expert consultant who can recommend the most cost effective ways to ensure your business continuity. Find out now what TelePacific and other competitive carriers can do to ensure your voice and data reliability with a toll free call or online inquiry about business continuity options.

ElephantDrive Never Forgets Your Files

You know what never forgets, don’t you? The elephant. So, what’s the perfect place to store your important files so that they’ll never be lost or destroyed? How about the memory of an elephant? No, not a pachyderm... an elephant drive!

So what kind of a drive is an elephant drive? It’s an online storage service called, appropriately, ElephantDrive. It’s got unlimited capacity, encrypted storage, easy access, and is very affordable for both individuals and business teams.

Try this. Think of an elephant in a cloud. Too silly? Then consider something more concrete, such as cloud based storage. That’s what we’re talking about here. The reason you’d want to store something in a cloud is to make sure there is a copy somewhere well away from where the data is normally kept. Why? Because disaster rarely strikes two unrelated locations simultaneously. Your office may get blown away by the next tornado, along with your computer, paper files and your complete collection of backup CD-ROMs. But out there in the cloud, your data is still spinning on a hard drive far away. As soon as you have a new computer to restore it to, you can have all your data back just like it was. Too bad about all that paper. It’s probably strewn across three states by now, making you look like a litterbug.

Storing files remotely sounds like a wise move, but is it really safe sending sensitive data over the Internet?

ElephantDrive has two mechanisms for ensuring the security of your information. Before transfer, your files are encrypted with the advanced 256 bit AES encryption, the one the U.S. government has approved for Top Secret files. Is what you are doing more sensitive than top secret? Then you better write it on small slips of paper that you can quickly chew up and swallow when threatened. Of course, using ElephantDrive will keep that nasty taste out of your mouth.

During the upload and download phase when the data is actually traversing the Internet, ElephantDrive uses secure 128 bit SSL or Secure Socket Layer encryption. That’s the system used by banks to secure their transactions.

OK, so your data is secure and you know that remote storage gives you disaster recovery should the worst happen. But how much does this cost and what do you get?

ElephantDrive has two categories of users. Home users order the Home Edition. Business users order the Pro Edition. There are also a couple of levels in each edition. Even the most basic Home Edition service for one computer offers unlimited storage and will maintain a 3 version history for 30 days in case something on your computer goes oops and you have to restore to a previous version known to work. Backups can be manual or automatic. The maximum size of individual files is a generous 1 GB. All this for $4.95 a month or $49.95 per year. There’s a 15 day free trial so you can give it a go and see how well the system works for you.

How about the business plans? For $34.95 a month, you can create up to 10 workgroup subaccounts with shared access. This will protect 10 computers with up to 1 TB of total storage. You’ll have access for up to 20 older versions of each file and automatic backups even include open files. Like the individual plan, you can get a 15 day free trial of the Pro Edition.

Still not enough capacity for your larger operation? No problem. ElephantDrive offers special enterprise edition plans for businesses with large volumes of data. Chances are there’s an elephant big enough to remember any size organization’s important data.

Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable that all your precious financial files, photos, music, correspondence, designs, and other computer based files are at risk for theft and disaster with only one copy stored anywhere? You’ll sleep a lot easier when you put an elephant on the job to remember your information and give it back to you when needed. Get the ElephantDrive free trial offer now, while you are thinking of it.