Business Benefits of Logical Network Design for High Availability

A truly problem free business network starts with a logical network design coupled with an infrastructure built from the ground up with high availability as a core focus.

A Solid Network Design Reduces Outages and Business Expense

A recent ICT report put the cost of an infrastructure outage at $100 Thousand USD per hour for Fortune 1000 companies responding to the survey, estimating the yearly cost of critical application outages to be between $1 – $2.5 Billion USD.

The cost of enterprise availability may be out of the financial reach of most businesses. However, with proper management, any business network can be designed with sufficient redundancy to ensure high-percentage network up-time.

Availability Starts with Proper Network Design

Essential business services and applications must be redundant across all platforms.

Put simply, any service or application that your organization requires to maintain standard operations, from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, must have the ability to failover to a redundant system capable of managing your businesses typical workload.

Every aspect of your internal and customer facing communication systems needs to be considered when weighing the cost vs. benefit of fault tolerance.

Depending on your businesses technology budget, this should include:

• Network cabling

A report from Fluke Networks determined that 80% of Cat 6 cables failed to meet specifications. That problem translates into low-quality network communications, which means poor network performance, and can lead to expensive network downtime. These issues are overcome by ensuring professionals install the structured cabling, and that any installation or redesign process requires cable certification. Additionally, despite the initial cost of investment, redundant network cabling has been shown to reduce business risk and downtime.

• Infrastructure

Purchasing and managing redundant switches, routers, and firewalls may be out of the financial range of smaller, and even mid-sized businesses. However, every business should invest in, and will benefit from, a redundant, virtualized server infrastructure. Ranging from redundant virtualized systems across multiple physical servers, to on-site backup & disaster recovery appliances with virtual failover, and hybrid cloud installations.

• Communications

While the expense of high-bandwidth business internet services may be cost prohibitive, the inclusion of less expensive cable broadband services could save your business thousands of dollars per hour during protracted primary ISP outages. Additionally, up and downstream communication partners (Internet Service Providers), hosted VoIP providers, and hosted email providers will need to be properly vetted to ensure maximum available uptime during normal business operations — significantly more than that if your company is invested in e-commerce or relies heavily on its online presence, especially if that presence is hosted on site.

Takeaway

A high availability network is the direct result of a quality network design and provides several benefits to businesses.

• Reduces costs associated with critical systems and service downtime.
• Ensures internal and customer facing lines of communication are always open.
• Provides better marketplace positioning against competitors who are less prepared for the inevitable disaster or catastrophic system failure.

If you are interested in learning more about how your business can benefit from network design services, contact us today!