Prevent Costly Internet Slowdowns and Outages
April 28, 2022
Downtime costs businesses more than $300K per hour
Ninety-one percent of enterprises report that Internet downtime costs their businesses more than $300,000 per hour. Combine that with a 32% rise in hourly downtime costs in the last seven years, and it's easy to see why preventing Internet disruptions is a priority for many organizations. In the end, Internet reliability boils down to three main factors: The quality of the network providing your service, the resiliency of your service, and cybersecurity.
Internet quality of service is not just an issue of full outages. What’s more likely to happen on a regular basis are slowdowns and packet loss. This occurs when data transmission is not happening in the timely, smooth, consistent flow needed. These delays experienced with video conferencing (like Zoom or Teams), phone calls with voice over IP, running Internet-based applications, or disrupted access to the Cloud can all result in costs to the organization.
Complete Internet failure can occur when there is a break in the fiber to your building, a break in a core network segment, or even from equipment failure somewhere in the network serving your facility.
Whether Internet connectivity is delayed or fails entirely, it impacts your organization's ability to carry out its services and earn revenue
Whether Internet connectivity is delayed or fails entirely, it impacts your organization’s ability to carry out its services and earn revenue. There are also derivative costs from increased customer turnover, lost productivity, and the cost of acquiring new business. The stakes are especially high in specific industries like finance, healthcare, and education.
In the financial services industry, time is money, and connectivity with the lowest latency and highest reliability is critical. Therefore, this vertical consistently selects high-speed, dedicated optical transport for their critical needs.
In the medical field, where the ability to send and access data and images is highly time-critical, Internet/data delivery delays and outages can have significant effects on healthcare provided. Once again, dedicated optical transport is the answer and is often combined with redundant connectivity for added resiliency in the event of a failure.
For schools, the shift to remote learning and online testing has made Internet connectivity crucial to a successful education experience. The inability to load materials, poor audio or video, and delays due to too many simultaneous users during peak hours, all have a negative effect, along with increased expenses for administration, IT, and cybersecurity.
The bottom line is that the cost to your organization goes up when your Internet connectivity goes down or slows down. Fortunately, there are performance-enhancing solutions to help mitigate the risks of costly Internet slowdowns and outages.
Dedicated Fiber Optics for High-Quality Service
With symmetrical speeds up to 100 Gbps, dedicated fiber Internet connectivity can mitigate or eliminate productivity losses and the resulting costs that can come from slow network performance.
Shared networks, or over-subscribed networks, are often found in services delivered by cable companies and can result in contention on the network. The traffic from numerous customers is pushed through aggregation points which can result in service slowdowns. For example, if numerous customers in a local geographic area, like a city block, are all running bandwidth-intensive applications, this could result in contention on the network and slow down all users.
Consider the quality of services needed and the associated costs for your business's connectivity
Organizations seeking fast, reliable, and resilient connectivity should choose dedicated fiber-optic connectivity. With bandwidth allocated solely to your organization, you will not have to contend with other customers for Internet performance. Additionally, fiber is not as sensitive to moisture and temperature fluctuations, which can interfere with connectivity, nor is it sensitive to interference from electronic or radio signals yielding a higher level of security than with shared Internet.
When deciding on the type of Internet connectivity for your organization, consider the quality of service needed and the associated costs. The ultimate answer may lie in the critical needs of your business.
High availability service is designed and engineered into the network by your service provider
High Availability Service Design
High availability service design may be the answer for your business to mitigate the impact of network failures like cable breaks and equipment failures. It is designed and engineered into the network by your service provider. This concept relies on redundancy at the different parts of the service delivery so that if one path suffers a catastrophic failure, the secondary path continues to function normally.
Working with a service provider that is an expert in high availability means that not only will they design redundant delivery, but they will also engineer the redundant services into their network to ensure true dual paths to the Internet. A real high availability solution includes dual electronics at the service location, dual, diverse network cables to the service location, and dual, diverse service paths through the provider's network back to the Internet.
Only your business can determine whether the added expense of high availability makes economic sense compared to the cost of a full Internet failure.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is necessary to protect against malicious attacks that can negatively impact your organization at every level. Recently, the global pandemic contributed to a 42% spike in security hacks and data breaches. Every second lost to disrupted services can harm your organization's finances and your brand's reputation.
A DDoS Protection solution can shield your network from a volumetric DDoS attack that can bombard and immobilize your connection to the Internet. DDoS protection automatically identifies and re-routes suspect data away from your network so that it can be cleaned and analyzed and then delivered cleanly without disturbance to your business. Its proactive detection, mitigation, and alert mechanisms are essential to protect your Internet connectivity.
Conclusion
Keeping your Internet running optimally is critical to your organization. When you partner with a trusted service provider like Lightpath, you gain the expertise to assess your needs, offer an array of reliability options, and ensure the implementation of the right solutions to keep your Internet running. Visit lightpathfiber.com or call 877-544-4872 to see how Lightpath can help and experience the Lightpath difference.
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