As the role of the Internet grows, the reliability of connections and constant availability of services is an absolute necessity for organisations. The ubiquity of cheap internet provision has encouraged organisations to empower mobile and home workers and rollout centralised IT services to remote offices and sometimes suppliers and customers.

 

This has sometimes resulted in mission critical business processes being at the mercy of ultra-low cost internet connections with no real commercial relationship or SLA to guarantee the service.

 

What can organisations do to reduce their dependence on cheap and cheerful Internet Service Providers? Is the only choice to invest in expensive leased line, frame relay or MPLS solutions that, although more reliable, still provide a single point of failure?

 

 

Resilient ISP solutions

There is another way – we can make two or more ISP connections redundant in a single simple solution, without expensive hardware or software, complex configuration or cooperation between service providers.

 

With a resilient ISP configuration you can easily add multiple Internet connections to your network by utilizing multiple ISPs, leased lines or a combination thereof. This enables you to:

 

• ensure that your network connection will be always available, even if your ISP fails.
• improve your Internet performance with increased bandwidth.
• provide for easy migration from one ISP to another.
• implement a gradual and transparent migration from costly leased lines or frame relay with the option to keep them as backups when needed.
• increase client and customer satisfaction.
• save money.

 

Such a solution removes your ISP as a single point of failure by allowing you to establish multiple Internet links simply and cost effectively. If one link fails, traffic is automatically failed over to the remaining links.

 

In addition, it also improves the performance of your Internet connectivity. It does this by load balancing outbound traffic across any number of Internet connections. Alternatively, you could route bandwidth intensive traffic such as web-browsing and email over one link, reserving another for a mission critical application, whilst all the time maintaining failover of services in the event that a link goes down.

 

These solutions can also address additional challenges such as the security of your system, fault tolerant VPNs, load-balancing, scalability, upgradeability and manageability.

 

You can guarantee that you always have Internet connectivity when you need it.