Business as Usual

Author: Tim Aboudara, Director of Sales, X2nSat

Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, fires, hurricanes and other acts of nature are the disaster recovery scenarios that most people think of that impact mission-critical communications infrastructure. These events are highly unpredictable and can also cause significant loss of human life. Businesses, governments, hospitals and other organizations need to have a plan in place for these large-scale disaster events.

What about those more pedestrian events like when someone digging with a backhoe inadvertently cuts a fiber-optic line? The odds are far more likely this man-made outage will occur versus a force of nature event. Lives are not directly at risk as in the scenario listed above, but when communications are down…you are still down no matter the cause. Central Office failures and Primary Connection failures do not happen every day, but they do occur and you need to have a plan in the unlikely circumstance that your company becomes impacted by any of these events.

Time is money, especially in the hyper speed world of the current business landscape that never stops 24/7/365. Global enterprise Hewlett-Packard recently estimated that unexpected network downtime costs their organization $900,000 per hour. Even though the total dollars are less, the impacts to smaller and mid-sized companies can be even greater as they do not have the luxury of the scale of larger organizations to absorb these kinds of losses.

A good place to start is to examine your organization and ask a few high level questions:

• What elements of your organization need to keep working when an outage occurs?
• What are the points of vulnerability?
• What back-up communications resources do you have in place?

The good news is that downtime due to man-made outages can be 100% preventable if an organization puts the appropriate back-up measures in place. Satellite-delivered continuity must be an element of every business continuity plan. SatCom redundancy maintains 99.9% annual network uptime and is completely independent of the terrestrial infrastructure that is vulnerable to the types of failures we have been discussing.

X2nSat takes a consultative approach to helping you answer some of the questions we have raised in this article and customizing a Disaster Recovery plan that will address the unique nature of your industry, business, and specific sites you operate. Natural disasters and distracted backhoe operators can both be a force of nature when it comes to vulnerable communications infrastructure. Make sure you have a plan in place to make sure it will always be business as usual.

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