A strong Business Continuity Plan is essential for any organization that wants to avoid the costly impact of network outages and service interruptions. From customer satisfaction to operational stability, building resiliency and redundancy into your infrastructure ensures you’re prepared for any disruption.
While booking a flight online, you click “pay now,” and the connection drops in mid-transaction. You’re streaming a movie, and the Wi-Fi clips just when the plot takes a twist. Or, your GPS loses its signal—leaving you lost, as well. If these everyday digital wrinkles leave you less than pleased, imagine the impact such outages have on the business side of those services. Oh, wait. No need to imagine. You are on the business side.
If your organization hasn’t made the time or investment to prepare and implement a formal business continuity plan (BCP) to avoid such costly business interruptions, you’re putting more at risk than just a wrinkle or two in customer satisfaction.
Ready for this? In its recent “Future of CX Report” conducted by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, market analysts found that 1-in-3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one negative experience, while 59% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
Three correlated market factors explain these drastic reactions:
- ever-increasing customer expectations
- the steady shrinking of customer patience
- the constant rise of competition.
With these three dynamics in constant play, gambling with having no formal BCP in place—especially for customer-facing operations—is, literally, a losing game.
Why Your Business Continuity Plan Must Include Resiliency and Redundancy
Whether you’re looking to outright prevent network outages or have a disaster recovery plan established in case one occurs, the two pillars for protecting business continuity are network resiliency & redundancy.
Namely, building an Internet and telecom network whose bandwidth and infrastructure are robust and flexible enough to manage throughput beyond your highest expected peaks of network traffic, and having an independent second point of access that offers true network fail-safe redundancy through physical network diversity. Because you can’t have true network redundancy if both your main and backup lines share the same access point.
A 5-Point Business Continuity Plan to Prevent Downtime
Solutions for network resiliency & redundancy come in all colors and flavors, but here’s a general approach to help your business prevent costly Internet or telecom downtime.
By planning and deploying some combination of the following failover tools, any size or type of business can avoid these devastating customer consequences. And here’s a bonus upfront: The physically nearer these tools are deployed to the EDGE of your network—as close as possible to where your IT team resides—the greater flexibility and control your team have in automating adjustments, on-demand and in real time.
- Assess Your Greatest Risks and Most Critical Systems
Identify essential or customer-facing operations where an outage would cause the most damage, then invest your attention and money first in fixing vulnerabilities. - Implement a Fully Independent Secondary Access Point
Research and deploy truly redundant network access points to ensure a seamless—and always available—failover rescue pathway for traffic, such as a Dedicated-Fixed Wireless Access (D-FWA) rooftop radio transmission line or Dedicated Internet Access (DIA). What’s the operative term here? Dedicated. - Utilize SD-WAN Traffic Management Tools
Software-Defined Wide Area Network traffic management tools, better known as an SD-WAN solution, can automatically reroute network traffic during lows and peaks. Such network load-balancing tools help you optimize performance, avoid throughput chokepoints, and reroute traffic seamlessly and automatically during an outage emergency. - Leverage Cloud Connectivity for Remote Access
Ensuring alternative cloud-based access to data is a solid plan for disaster recovery during a network outage, so your employees and customers can access what they need at any time and from any location. - Consider a VoIP Telecom Solution
A Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) telecom system not only enables extended capability through the seamless integration of your phones to other digital platforms but allows your desktop handsets to remain connected even during network outages.
Ready to sharpen your customer service EDGE?
If you’re looking for business continuity solutions with a partner who is ideally equipped to deliver greater choice, access, and control right to the network EDGE, talk to Skywire today to expand your options in reliable business communications.
We’ll show you what we mean when we say—Connectivity to the EDGE. Your Way.™ — and how greater choice in broadband capability, complete with unprecedented access flexibility, makes us the preferred alternative for providing affordable, customizable, and truly diverse network EDGE connectivity.
