Remember how it felt when your broadband went down and you were expecting to receive an important file or email? You’d imagine that the feeling would be so much worse if your business was dependent on The Cloud. Well, that’s not necessarily the case.
If Your Broadband Goes Down And Your Business Requires You To Be In The Office
In this case, you need to have a ‘fail-safe’ if your broadband goes down and you really have two options to choose from.
Option 1 – a spare broadband line. Ideally, each broadband line would be a completely different type of internet connection – e.g. one broadband through the telephone line using an ADSL router (BT/TalkTalk/Sky etc.) and one fibre-optic connection using a cable modem (Virgin Media) – so that you minimise the risk that a failure at the ‘telephone exchange’ knocks out both connections. There are broadband routers on the market that can provide connections to both kinds of network (Draytek Vigor 2820 available at the time of writing). Of course, having a single broadband router leaves that as a failure point so best to have a spare one of those set up, in the cupboard just in case. If you need a seamless automatic fail-over in the event of multiple failures, you’d better give me a call to discuss a more technical setup.
The cost of a redundant broadband connection is roughly double that of a normal broadband connection since you essentially have two broadband connections available at all times.
Option 2 – wireless broadband. Not dissimilar to option 1, this replaces the spare broadband connection with a 3G dongle from a mobile provider. A much cheaper implementation since you can buy ‘pay as you go’ 3G dongles so you’d only pay for the connection when you use it. That said, the connection speed is likely to be a lot slower than you’re used to on your normal broadband connection and typically 3G dongles have a data limit on them so you may need to be prepared to top-up! Google ‘3G broadband routers’ to find makes and models.
Your Broadband Goes Down And Your Business Does Not Require You To Be In The Office
One big benefit of working in The Cloud is that you can access your services from anywhere, so simply pop to your nearest internet cafe or connect from home and you’ll be able to access all the same services you could from work.
In either case above, it’s always a good idea to protect your broadband router, network switch, main computer and monitor with an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). Depending on the size of the UPS, in the event of a power cut, you will be able to continue working for up to an hour. You can find these by googling Uninterruptible Power Supply and typically expect to pay from £150 to £1,000 depending on how long you anticipate needing to work when the power goes off.
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