WAN Outage Avoidance via Unified Bandwidth Management

We are the Internet Redundancy Experts! Our EdgeXOS platform pays for itself through the avoidance of a single outage incident. The Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., as reported by eWEEK, demonstrated that businesses can lose up to $5,000 per minute during a major network outage. With short duration outages (several hours) still costing tens of thousands in lost productivity and revenue.

XRoads' UBM platforms ensure uptime for both outbound connectivity (from internal users) as well as inbound connectivity (from external users attempting to access server resources). Additionally the EdgeXOS platform incorporates geographic ActiveDNS redundancy capabilities which assist in ensuring uptime across two or more data centers.

Internet Redundancy: How does it work?

The goal with any type of network redundancy is to ensure that end-users are able to access server-based resources. Our UBM platforms ensure this connectivity by constantly monitoring each available network path and/or remote resource and when a failure is detected all connection requests are automatically re-routed in order to prevent the end-user from losing connectivity with the server resource.

Technology Involved:

The EdgeXOS platform utilizes XRoads' ActiveHA feature with Deep Path Inspection™ which monitors beyond the ISP gateway in order to provide reliable outage information, ActiveDNS feature which automatically changes DNS responses in order to allow end-users to access the available WAN link, and Adaptiband with Dynamic Bandwidth Management to prevent short bursts of high volume traffic from causing network slowness and/or prevent critical applications from operating at their most efficient levels.

XRoads Networks engineering team specializes in examining customer networks and producing the most efficient and reliable connectivity available. Please give us a call or request a call back and we will assist in optimizing your backup solution as well.

Risk vs. Cost Assessment

One must evaluate the potential cost/benefit of any equipment acquisition, and every customer has different levels of risk depending on their network footprint, applications used, along with the size and scope of their work force, however the following is a good method to calculate your potential cost:

A U.S. Department of Labor study asserted that "93 percent of companies that experience a significant data loss will be out of business within five years." Even lesser disruptions can cause significant loss - lost revenue, lost productivity and lost profits. BizJournal

The standard business interruption (BI) definition and formula used by insurance companies can be used to better understand network outage costs:

BI = T x Q x V, where: BI = business interruption and T = the number of time units (hours, days) operations are shut down and Q = the quantity of goods normally produced, or sold, per unit of time used in T and V = the value of each unit of production, usually expressed in profit.

As an example, consider an attorney whose access to their cloud-server fails and requires several days to restore to normal operations. If the attorney bills at $175.00 per hour and is not able to bill for 20 hours, then the business interruption cost = BI = T x Q x V = 20 x 1 x $175 = $3,500 in missed revenue or delayed positive cash flow.

Historical Network Outage Risks

The following are some examples of the type of risks involved when suffering a network outage. These examples are taken from news reports and studies conducted by well known organizations to assist companies properly weigh their strategic risk and options.

The average T1 link suffers from up to nearly nine hours (8.76) of downtime per year. Businesses on average have a total of 14 hours of downtime per year which translates to up to $150,000 in lost revenue, damaged repuation, etc. This report from InformationWeek demonstrates the problem.

When the network is down, nobody is happy. At least that is the conclusion of Network Computing in their 2013 article on how network outages affect businesses, their end-users, and their reputations. This article from Network Computing provides some examples as to what can happen with the network goes down.

Unplanned downtime is expensive, a report by Emerson confirmed just how expensive an outage can be. The average cost per hour of downtime was found to be approximately $5,000 however it could be as much as $11,000 depending on a number of factors, including your dependancy on network-based applications. The findings were reported by eWEEK.