How System Downtime Can Affect Your Company (And What To Do About It)

Jan 5, 2021

Most of us know what it’s like to deal with a short-term network outage at home. It’s inevitably frustrating to find yourself suddenly unable to scroll through Facebook or stream content from Netflix. When network outages happen at work, though, it’s more than just frustrating. Even a couple of minutes of downtime can lead to significant consequences for the business.

The good news? With the right technological backstops, including network failover options, you can safeguard your business against any kind of network outage. Let’s take a closer look at why all of this matters and explore the technologies that can help your business stay up and running (and making money).

 

How Network Downtime Can Impact Your Business

There are a number of ways in which network downtime can strike a major blow to your business. Here are just a few of the most notable examples.

Network Downtime Means Lost Productivity

Today’s businesses depend on online communication and collaboration. Email, virtual chat, project management tools, file-sharing platforms… these tools are essential for employees to do their work. And with more and more companies adapting to a remote or hybrid work model, being able to keep everyone connected is more crucial than ever.

 

The point is, a network outage may leave your employees with nothing to do, which may, in turn, result in key projects being delayed. If nothing else, it means you’re paying salaries and rent even though your employees are not actually able to get any work done. And if you’re in an industrial or manufacturing setting, the consequences could be even direr, potentially including a production shutdown that impacts the entire supply chain.

 

Downtime Can Result in Brand Damage

 Imagine you’re running a call center, and you have 50 customer support agents on the phone dealing with issues or inquiries. All of a sudden, all 50 calls are dropped. And when those customers call again, they find themselves once again stuck in a 30-minute queue.

Naturally, a situation like this can be damaging to your brand and may result in a lot of lost customers. And winning those customers back may be close to impossible. Factor in the negative online reviews that those customers leave, and you could potentially have a serious and ongoing issue, all caused by a single network outage.

 

A Network Outage Means Lost Opportunity

One final example of how a network outage can adversely impact your business? It may take your online services offline for a few minutes or even a few hours. And that, in turn, can result in lost sales.

Imagine a customer is trying to access your website to purchase a product or book an appointment, or simply to find out more information about your business. If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, that customer is likely to grow impatient and head elsewhere. And the odds of winning back that customer are going to be fairly low.

How To Reduce or Eliminate Downtime

Obviously, it’s in your business's best interests to protect itself against network downtime. There are a few ways in which you can do that, particularly by embracing network failover solutions. The terminologies and principles mentioned below may sound highly technical and intimidating to non-IT folks, but the overall idea to understand is this: instant and imperceivable insurance for internet failures.

The best technology to ensure a constant connection is called SD-WAN. What is SD-WAN, exactly? SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Networking, is a groundbreaking - but simple -  approach to office networking. This solution provides optimal performance for all your web/cloud applications, as well as your voice and video services.

How does SD-WAN work? Basically, it provides instant and seamless failover using multiple connections, including cellular as a backup. Businesses can protect mission-critical services from outages by using, for instance, a main fiber connection, a coax secondary connection, and a 4G/5G wireless connection. These data pipes can instantly and seamlessly switch throughput from one to the other depending on failover need, or they can be “bundled” together and can continuously load-balance network transfer so there is always data redundancy.  This always-on failover is important for any and all cloud-based apps but is especially critical for voice – and particularly in call centers. (You don't want your customers cut off from your support or sales people because someone down the road accidentally broke a fiber line while planting a tree). The great part of SD-WAN technology is that all of these configurations (and many more) can be managed in one, centralized dashboard. You, your IT provider, or TelWare can easily view and manage the data connections. In short, SD-WAN protects you against sudden disruptions to your network and allows you to keep your full online operation running smoothly and consistently.

 

Find Out About Solutions from TelWare

TelWare supplies redundant data centers, combined with onsite SD-WAN-configured routers that provide dependable failover pathways for mission-critical applications and services. We’re happy to furnish businesses and call centers with a full range of solutions and safeguards against network disruption.

We’d love to talk further about any of these solutions. Reach out to the team at TelWare whenever you’re ready to chat. You can also get more info at telware.com/sd-wan-solutions.

To learn more about staying current with the latest communications technology, contact TelWare at 1.800.637.3148 or email us at sales@telware.com. TelWare is a national leader in the installation of voice, video, data, and unified communications solutions.

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