Today's highly connected organizations rely on vast amounts of data to maintain their daily operations. Any failure of the communications network could mean significant losses. For example, when employees and partners are unable to access e-mail or company systems it can have serious effect on productivity. Retailers stand to lose revenue if transaction information from point-of-sale operations is not received. A disabled network also impacts production schedules, causing loss of valuable time.
Although more difficult to quantify, communications failure can even damage a company's public image. Customer perception of a business can be greatly influenced by their experiences online. Shoppers can be lost forever if the website is not working properly because competitive offerings are just a mouse-click away.
Network downtime is the result of two types of failures.
First, whenever an Internet Service Provider (ISP) experiences problems and the broadband connection goes down, their business customers can lose Internet connectivity and valuable work time.
Second, even if a company still has Internet access, a network outage can cause their virtual private network (VPN) to fail, leaving remote workers and business partners unable to access central office resources. This can have serious consequences if vendors or departments such as accounting or payroll are unable to access data to complete end of quarter bookkeeping, for example.
In order to support daily operations and maintain business continuity, an organization must be able to move vast amounts of data quickly, reliably and securely. But the complexity of managing a comprehensive network infrastructure is taxing IT departments like never before. Medium-sized companies, especially, are feeling the pressure. These companies have the same tasks to perform as larger organizations, but do not have the resources.
And it is IT managers that are held accountable for the consequences, even if what occurred was entirely outside of their control. For this reason IT managers are looking to implement “insurance policies” for their organizations-namely integrated, robust security solutions capable of keeping critical applications up and running at all times. IDC projects that spending on business continuity solutions of this kind will increase between 2002 and 2007 to reach more than $118 bn.
Toward a Smart Solution According to a 2003 survey conducted by SonicWALL, customers purchasing business continuity solutions reported that network reliability is the number one factor that influences buying decisions. Network reliability is achieved using failover redundancy for all key components, thereby ensuring that no single point of failure impacts network availability.
Best Practices...
... that organizations of all sizes should incorporate in a number of core technologies
ISP failover: a dual connection to the Internet either through two different ISPs, or with two separate interfaces to two geographically dispersed locations of the same ISP. Regardless of the approach, the result ensures an automatic back-up if one line fails for any reason. By distributing the risk, a company minimizes its vulnerability to a network outage.
VPN redundancy: allows remote/branch offices and business partners to establish a VPN connection to a secondary gateway at corporate headquarters if the connection to the primary gateway fails. The switch from one VPN tunnel to another should be transparent to employees, partners, customers-and even to the network administrator. Maintaining a continuous connection with the central office ensures that remote employees and business partners can access the vital information they need, when they need it.
WAN failover: two different types of media can be involved. If the primary Internet access connection is T1 or broadband then the secondary connection might be a more economical alternative such as analog or ISDN. This approach is often used by retail businesses with numerous POS locations. An alternative is to use different service providers for independent connections so that any problem encountered by one provider does not affect other areas of business.
Load balancing: optimizes both primary and secondary connections so that neither sits idle, enhancing the network connectivity investment. The secondary connection provides back-up insurance but also improves network performance by sharing the traffic load. Cross-media redundancy provides another type of load balancing. In this scenario, failover capabilities utilize different types of Internet services.
Hardware failover: to ensure network reliability, hardware failover provides two components that serve the same function. In the case of the active unit failing, the passive unit automatically detects and assumes responsibility for forwarding traffic. This redundancy can be achieved by deploying two identical routers or firewalls. Alternatively, a company might opt for internal redundancy with two WAN interfaces in the same box. Hardware failover can even be used in “active-active” mode to enable load balancing, thus creating a highly efficient method for distributing WAN traffic.
Stateful synchronization: a feature that provides automatic failover to a backup ISP if the primary connection goes down. The failover transition is invisible to end-users and protects transactions in process from being lost or corrupted. Stateful synchronization is of especial importance to retail businesses.
In summary, the technology to implement failsafe procedures for taking care of network connectivity is today available to businesses of all sizes. Such solutions should provide network reliability via failover redundancy; ease of use; manageability/flexibility; enterprise-class features and functionality and excellent price/performance.
Generally speaking this is achieved by implementing redundancy at every network connection point. At the hardware level, a network might have dual routers or firewalls. A business may also choose to introduce some external redundancy, such as two different ISP connections into the same router or firewall.
A good business continuity solution for small and mid-sized networks needs to provide a comprehensive yet cost-effective set of features. Solutions must scale to meet any size of organization. Customers don't want to pay for more bandwidth than necessary, yet they need a flexible solution that can keep pace with their company's changing requirements.
The solution must also be quick to deploy and easy to administer, especially if the organization has limited IT resources. Above all, the security system should be easy to manage.
Products that have been developed for large enterprises are often offered to small- and medium-sized businesses in “lite” formats. However, such products are usually designed to offer comprehensive feature sets to major enterprises. This means they often do not meet the needs of organizations with limited resources that cannot afford to support them and have no need for many of the features in any case.
Another approach is to customize a solution by cobbling together best-in-class components from various vendors. The downside is that this is often complicated, costly, and fraught with integration and maintenance issues that IT managers generally prefer to avoid. The training requirements alone can be prohibitive for a resource-limited organization. Ideally, a fully integrated business continuity solution will scale to exact price/performance specifications. A package that provides all of the necessary functionality-and perhaps even some bonus capabilities for enhanced productivity- is more likely to meet the IT manager's needs.
Shubhomoy Biswas maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in The author is country manager, SonicWALL India
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