Resilience

We have worked with so many small businesses over the last 10+ years and have encountered numerous IT network challenges and learned so much from these experiences. In environments where uptime is essential to the lifeblood of the business, we are able to provide redundant solutions to protect those companies from major disruptions to their work day. One example of this would be a security appliance that offers redundant WAN (two separate internet service providers), connections. In the event of a service outage, our clients who have implemented this solution typically don’t even notice the outage as the connection fails over to the second provider automatically and we receive an alert that the primary service is experiencing an issue and can take appropriate response or action. A second example of this resiliency we can provide our Managed IT Service clients is using cloud based WiFi access points that are able to self heal in the event of a failed or disconnected individual access point(s). This self healing allows the other WiFi access points to adjust radio signal strength, channel optimization and other settings on the fly when one or more of many access points is reported as offline. We discuss these and other potential points of network failure following our initial assessment with a new client and revisit any remaining or potential risks during our technology business reviews with ongoing clients.

Cloud Solutions and Robust Design

Our preference for network devices (security appliances, switches and WiFi access points), is to implement products that are designed, maintained and monitored using a cloud based solution or vendor. This allows for a number of benefits including:

  • Easy setup which can be pre configured prior to device even being received
  • Improved security (enforcing multi factor authentication, automating security and firmware updates outside business hours, built in scanning for regulatory standards in configurations such as PCI compliance, etc.)
  • Ongoing monitoring of a network environment and nearly realtime notification of potential issues or concerns
  • Customized and automated reports and insights regarding network usage and security related events