Increased load shedding, a marked increase in fibre failures and the rising cost of doing business are top concerns for every South African business, and small to mid-size businesses are particularly hard hit by these challenges.
For SMEs and SOHOs, connectivity and power outages derail business continuity and operations if their networks go down along with the power. And the situation is getting worse: with warnings of Stage 8 load shedding or worse, increasing cable theft, and more and more back activators performing emergency repairs, small businesses can’t count on staying connected through extended outages for whatever the reason
The good news is that with proper planning and network optimisation, SMEs can build in the same levels of connectivity resilience and redundancy major enterprises enjoy – without the need for enterprise-level resources and associated costs.
To develop a connectivity resilience strategy, businesses should start by understanding their connectivity requirements and areas of risk. The underlay – or foundation – and its interaction with the overlay – all the services on top of it – must be understood as well as their impact on the business if not available or functioning optimally. As businesses become more dependent on the cloud for continuity, they must mitigate dependence on a single access last mile connectivity medium.
This means one fibre connection is not enough and a mobile or fixed LTE backup solution just doesn’t cut the mustard – businesses need a robust resilient underlay (offering equivalent performance metrics) of at least two providers who aren’t dependent on each other.
The following seven steps are critical to planning and network optimisation:
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Assess Current Infrastructure:
Understand your existing network infrastructure and how it in turn supports your business applications
Before moving to procure additional connectivity services, it is important to get a good understanding of what you currently have, and what you need.
Assess the current capabilities, performance, and limitations. Consider your business strategy and future requirements. Reviewing your connectivity strategy offers a good opportunity to audit hardware, software, data transmission speeds, latency issues, and potential security vulnerabilities.
An advanced SD-WAN solution can help you understand your connection performance and traffic patterns, to avoid over-speccing and implement only the connectivity solutions that meet your needs.
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Define Business Needs:
What do you need from your connectivity?
Many small businesses do not have a good understanding of their connectivity requirements. They tend to over- or under-spec, resulting in overspending on the one hand, or poor performance on the other.
Many small business owners assume that because they have a certain bandwidth available at their home, they need the same in their business. However, the average business does not stream HD TV, and likely needs less bandwidth than a home does for day-to-day transactions and communications.
Home services are typically best effort and when they go down, there is no urgency in getting them fixed, whereas for your business, no connectivity equals no trading which equals lost revenues.
For the same price as an unnecessarily high-capacity connection without a service guarantee, a business could install two lower capacity connections from different service providers, fused via SD-WAN, and enjoy the same user experience with a far more resilient environment.
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Identify Key Stakeholders:
In planning for connectivity resiliency, every user, device and application and all their requirements should be considered. If you upload huge files (images, video, backup’s, etc.) to a cloud-based application, for example, uplink is more important than downlink capacity – the question is are you getting the service you are paying for?. If certain systems are so mission critical (voice and trading are) that a few seconds of switchover time to backup power is unacceptable, this must be factored in.
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Choose the Right Technologies:
Depending on your needs, various technologies might be appropriate. There is no one-size fits all solution available or appropriate for all businesses in every location. Depending on the use case and the available technologies in the location, businesses might combine fixed wireless access (FWA), LTE, fibre, or satellite. A hybrid approach helps build in resilience.
It should be noted that Licensed FWA services offer the best alternative to fibre, delivering stronger, more resilient guaranteed connections than unlicensed wireless connectivity. Our Comsol Connect solution rivals fibre services in terms of overall qualitative performance, with our network supported by a 24/7 state-of-the-art Network Operations Centre.
It is also important to know whether your connections have interdependencies – for example, both fibres are in a single duct that could be impacted by construction work, or two service providers use the same underlying infrastructure.
Because the telecoms environment is so convoluted, it helps to work with an ‘honest broker’ service provider who understands all aspects of last mile connectivity solutions, the fibre routes, inter-dependents routes are the questions to ask, to have the best chance of building resiliency into the network.
An SD-WAN can then be deployed to fuse connections from different service providers, to provide aggregated consolidated bandwidth and ensure that the connection does not drop even if one of the two or more connections fail. You won’t even experience buffered video under failure conditions.
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Select a Provider:
Choose a provider that can meet your needs in terms of capabilities, support, and cost. The biggest link isn’t always the appropriate one, and the cheapest option most definitely isn’t always the best one.
Businesses must consider reliability, service quality, cost, and the capacity and performance they need to run their operations. Owners and CEO’s need to ask themselves a question about the cost of the ‘hassle factor’ when services are not optimal.
Manual switchovers to backup services that need data loaded, their employee and customer experience during failures. The hassle factor costs are no doubt much higher than paying for the right service in the first place.
Comsol’s approaches to building in connectivity resilience include using multiple connections and connecting you to multiple fibre rings and ensuring as far as possible that the impact of load shedding is mitigated, or at least the truth told about the true availability of services under load shedding. .
Comsol’s Licensed FWA is designed to deliver an enterprise-grade, fibre-equivalent experience, with power redundancy recently improved to handle load shedding between Stage 8-10.
Backup power is a key challenge for all network operators, with the major problems including vandalism and theft, and the time available to recharge backup infrastructure between outages.
Comsol is comfortable that we will be able to continue to support our customers up to Stage 10 outages, thanks to our small factor, low-power infrastructure and improved backup power capabilities.
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Design and Implement:
Design the new connectivity system, with your chosen partner, then implement it. The right partner will not only work to understand your business requirements, they will also have in-depth insights into the best technologies available to address your needs.
Remember to ask your service providers about the alternate technologies and infrastructure providers and not just consider a quick fix at the cheapest cost.
Test and Optimise:
The right partner will help you determine through testing whether your connectivity strategy meets your needs. With visibility gained through an SD-WAN, you are able to properly test the failover, test loads on the autonomous power, and fix and optimise the network. This is a continual process – ideally, network performance and user experience should be assessed quarterly.
The right SDWAN solution will test this continuously and inform service providers that their services are not within specification and report such faulty without you even knowing about it, taking services in to and out of service automatically. This is where we need bots, not at the consulting stage.
Remember that a good connectivity strategy should be tailored to your organisation’s specific needs and resource availability and capability. Whatever connectivity solutions or partners you choose, the single most important measure to mitigate the risk of losing your connection is to move away from dependence on a single last mile connectivity access medium and service provider.
By Justin Colyn, Sales and Marketing Director at Comsol
