Business leaders today know staying online is critical in today’s ever-connected world. While various digital transformation strategies will undoubtedly include disaster recovery and infrastructure security programs, it’s important to evaluate the disaster recovery plans of other business services, including utilities, cloud providers and internet service providers.

In many cities throughout the country, major communication companies house their critical equipment in large, unmarked structures. These buildings are designed to withstand weather, earthquakes, and bombings. However, on December 25, 2020, this theory was proven wrong. On Christmas morning of 2020, AT&T became one such example as the people of Nashville, TN awoke to terrifying news of an explosion in the downtown area.

The immediate reaction was one of shock and awe concerned about the safety and wellbeing of residents and businesses. Over the next hours and days, the ripple effects of this explosion (bombing) created a textbook example of how fragile our communications infrastructure really is.

For the first few hours after the explosion, very few issues were encountered. But as the backup systems started to fail, so did voice, data, and wireless communications for thousands of customers in multiple states. Even other communications companies were affected outside of AT&T. These issues lasted several days, requiring AT&T to create temporary infrastructure in the parking lot of a sports stadium.

In 2021 business communications is critical to survival. What applications do you use daily to run your business? Office 365, Salesforce, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Cloud Voice, the list is lengthy. The common thread is communications. Without secure and robust internet access, none of these applications are usable. The events of December 25th in Nashville proved that even the largest communications providers are vulnerable, and we are only one event away from our business being impacted or shutdown.

Dedicated primary internet provider

  1. A dedicated fiber optic internet service is recommended as the primary internet service for all businesses.
  2. The service is dedicated rather than shared like small business copper (Coax) service.
  3. The upload and download speeds are the same (i.e. 50MBs Download /50Mbs Upload)

Secondary internet provider (Different than the primary provider)

  1. This service can be either fiber or coax.
  2. The speeds of this service can be less as this service is acting as a backup.
  3. If possible, inquire if the secondary service can enter your business from another location vs. the primary service (point of entry)

Cellular options (4G / 5G) are also an option as a secondary provider.

  1. These options can be costly if used for long periods of time.
  2. The performance of the cellular options can vary but may be sufficient to support business operations until the primary service is restored.

Firewall

  1. Make sure your firewall supports the option of failover (allows for hardware firewalls to have some redundancy).
  2. While most enterprise firewalls support multiple internet connections some consumer and small business models do not.
  3. This is a good time to review one of the most important tools protecting your business.

Contact us for an assessment to make sure your business is fully covered in case of an unforeseen event.