Written by There’s a cloud of uncertainty when It comes to the internet. An uncontrolled platform for people to vent their views and opinions with no proof or evidence.
Ideas and articles can quickly snowball through the platform, gathering momentum and tricking even the most experienced users into accepting the internet at face value.
Therefore, it’s easy to assume that lower costs and more flexibility is available to us all. IT is often the first to be sacrificed when it comes to cost cutting. We often assume that the things we don’t see are of no use to us and IT can be a costly platform of hidden figures and stats. Cutting the funds in IT is often seen as an easy get-out for releasing funds elsewhere.
Because of this, many businesses fall short and end up purchasing consumer grade equipment and services. Whilst the savings can be generous (up to 40% on current expenditure) the downside means no SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are in place, meaning you’re left in the dark when your internet goes down.
Making A Choice
When it comes to internet connectivity there’s no right or wrong side to be on. One solution is not necessarily better than the others, but you do need to make considerations for your environment (both physically and business wise). Whilst you may not see any immediate benefits to selecting the right deal, selecting the wrong solution can put a huge risk on your business.
A key factor for enterprise is the ability to deploy various connectivity solutions with varying performance, resilience and guarantees (all based on business requirements). You should also consider how you plan to manage these solutions, with a single global service being an important differentiator when choosing a supplier.
What and Why Do You Need It?
Before making any final decisions, you should evaluate what you need as a business.
Whether you run a data centre or a manufacturing plant, considerations should be taken to determine what level of connectivity you require. Businesses that offer a single one-stop
solution may sound cheaper and packed with benefits but you may be paying for services you don’t require. Here at Workflow we focus on a more bespoke installation, which can save your business money over the lifecycle of the service.
If you run a small, nine to five business, consumer broadband may well tick the boxes for you. Connecting a larger business, or multiple sites might soon scupper your plans though. Although worst case scenarios, businesses operating consumer broadband have reported connectivity blackout for over a week before repair. With no SLAs you’re in no man’s land until a repair is discovered. Can you afford to run a week with no connectivity? In 2018, I highly doubt it. In instances of this nature, the cost savings made at the start of the license are soon lost by a loss of sales the lack of connectivity produced.
Have You Tried MPLS?
The fact that we can use new technologies now, doesn’t mean we need to completely throw out older ones. By combining MPLS with new services like SD-WAN, your solution can perform much better.
To deliver the level of reliability required for critical sites, dedicated access is required to ensure service diversity across the solution. Diversity begins with separate duct access into the critical location, allowing separate cable/fibre/equipment feeds from multiple points of presence, from multiple providers. This ensures that a physical breach of the path (cutting the cable or damage from fire or flood), or a failure in the provider’s high-order network does not impact all connectivity to the site.
Connecting those diverse paths into geographically separate local nodes of a Global MPLS network provides that next level of diversity and connectivity needed to ensure delivery. The MPLS service provides the ability for traffic at the IP layer to utilise the diverse connections into a site to guarantee the delivery of the service.
Class of Service markings are then used at a packet level to prioritise traffic types over that infrastructure to align with the performance attributes of the key applications.
With your critical sites connected in this manner, you have mitigated the key factors of failure by ensuring diversity in the traffic path between your critical sites.
Sometimes, the older methods are still the best.
Mix and Match
Once you’ve secured your critical sites with a defined infrastructure network — like MPLS, with guaranteed delivery, reliability, class of service — you can build up a hybrid position using internet connectivity to service other, less critical, sites.
The key for a seamless service is that these less critical sites have a solution to get them into the MPLS network regionally, allowing them to consume business applications in a resilient manner.