Optimizing and Improving Your Internet Connectivity

STEP 1:

Understand the many ways that internet connections fail

Access circuit outage Latency spikes or packet loss Scheduled (or unscheduled) maintenance Natural disasters Hardware failure

Power outage Physical cutting of the service line Human error DDoS or other cyber attacks

STEP 2:

Identify your primary goal(s)

Determine which of the following are critical for your organization:

• Get as much uptime as possible
• Resume business operations quickly following an outage or natural disaster
• Optimize cloud technology and application performance (video conferencing, VoIP calls, Microsoft 365, PoS, CRM, ERP…)
• Avoid interruptions when failing over from one internet connection to another
• Efficiently manage company IT resources

STEP 3:

Consider your organization’s needs to optimize your internet failover setup

Internet backbone diversity

Separate internet backbone connections. This gives you a greater ability to mitigate problems and route around issues.

Last mile & connection technology diversity

Physical diversity in the ”last mile” to your offices and sites consisting of multiple and different circuit types (i.e. a combination of fiber, cable, fixed wireless, cellular, or satellite connections).

Same IP address failover

A static public IP address that doesn’t change when your traffic moves between internet connections. This ensures that all your applications automatically stay up and running without any noticeable disruption, even when one of your circuits is experiencing an outage or performance issues.

Active-active or active-passive configuration

An active-active configuration is where both (or all) of your internet connections are actively carrying some of your traffic at any given time. You can even have different types of traffic routed to the connection that’s best suited for it. In an active-passive configuration, one line sits idle waiting for the primary line to completely fail before hopping into action.

Bi-directional QoS (Quality of Service)

Bi-directional QoS allows you to prioritize important traffic, and even route upload and download traffic to specific circuits for maximum control; compared to traditional failover options that almost never give you control over your download traffic.

Automated, intelligently-powered software

Software that automatically monitors your circuit performance, detects and classifies new technologies and traffic types on your network, and routes and reroutes your traffic to prevent disruptions – without the need for constant manual policy configuration, testing, debugging, and implementation.

STEP 4:

Choose the best internet failover setup for your organization

Internet failover isn’t one-size-fits-all; what’s right for one organization may not make sense or be reliable enough for another. The main factors to consider are IT resources, budget, and how much the business relies on cloud- and internet-based applications.