Network downtime is a serious issue, and every minute counts. According to a recent Forbes article, the cost of downtime can reach $9,000 per minute or a staggering $540,000 per hour for large corporations. For certain industries such as finance, media, and transportation, the cost can be far higher.
The impact of network downtime is not just to your bottom line; it can do serious damage to your company’s reputation with customers, and in some cases draw penalties and fines.
With potential impacts that are so serious, minimizing any potential downtime to ensure business continuity must be a top priority. An important part of any strategy for both large corporations as well as small and medium-sized businesses to reduce downtime risk should include network redundancy.
Effective network redundancy is crucial to ensuring that organizations and their employees have uninterrupted access to their applications and data.
Some of the safeguards delivered by network redundancy include:
- Faster disaster recovery time from potential cyberattacks or natural disasters
- Reduced risks of a single point of failure disrupting the network by providing multiple data paths
- Minimized downtime risk by enabling continuous operation during outages or failures
- Flexibility to scale as needed to meet changing demands without increasing downtime risk
What Is Network Redundancy?
Network redundancy is the process of using backup network resources to reduce downtime in the case of a system failure, cyberattack, natural disaster, or power outage. This means building a duplicate network infrastructure and running a redundant set of services and applications that ensure business continuity.
Key Components
Some key components of network redundancy include:
Failover – The network failover is the mechanism or process that provides physical redundancy by switching network traffic from a primary link to a backup link when the primary link becomes unavailable.
Backup links – Backup links provide backup paths for data to flow if the main network connection fails. Upon failure, the backup link will operate in the same manner as the main network connection, enabling seamless connectivity.
Redundant hardware – Hardware or device-level redundancy ensures that a backup device can seamlessly take over from a device that has failed. Examples of hardware include network components such as routers and switches, storage devices, servers, and power supplies.
Redundancy Types
There are several different ways to achieve redundancy:
Geographic redundancy – Geographic redundancy means operating a redundant network in a different physical location than the primary network. If a power loss or natural disaster occurs in one location, geographic redundancy can serve as a strategy to provide continuous availability.
Physical redundancy – Physical redundancy means standing up a secondary physical network that duplicates the servers, switches, redundant links between devices, and all other physical pieces of network equipment. One of the best ways of reducing the “single point of failure” risk, if a piece of equipment fails, the redundant piece of equipment will continue, providing continuous operations.
Logical redundancy – Logical redundancy is a type of network redundancy that aims to achieve high availability – 99.999% uptime or “five nines” availability. It does this by utilizing redundant software to perform activities such as load balancing, which distributes workload across multiple systems, and failover mechanisms that automatically shifts to available hardware components if primary components fail.
Why is Network Redundancy Crucial for Business Continuity?
Ensuring the continuous operations of your business is something you cannot do without a redundant network. Below are a few reasons why:
Preventing Downtime – Downtime is disruptive. Minimizing the duration and impact of any downtime is a critical goal. Providing multiple paths for data to travel, and the ability to automatically switch to working equipment when an event occurs, will keep your employees connected and the business running while you make critical repairs to the main network.
Cost of Downtime – Downtime is expensive. While your network is down, your employees have difficulty working, which leads to lower productivity. Customers and clients are harder to reach, limiting your communication and potential sales. With people expecting uninterrupted access to their products and services, prolonged downtime can damage trust.
Data Protection – Keeping data available and secure requires a multi-faceted approach, one aspect of which is network redundancy. Minimizing downtime means employees have continuous access to data while protecting against any loss of data due to a network failure.
Common Causes of Network Failures
Even the most carefully constructed networks are vulnerable to disruption:
Hardware failure – Network devices can fail, leading, in some cases, to total network failure. While the more common failures occur in outdated equipment, hardware can fail due to corrupted patches or upgrades, configuration errors, overheating, or water damage resulting from a natural disaster.
Software failure – Software failures can happen for many reasons: files can become corrupted, licenses can expire, an update or patch may not be properly tested, or a new bug or glitch can be introduced. This is exactly what happened in July of 2024, when a software bug that was introduced into a single software update caused a global IT outage, crashing approximately 8.5 million computers.
Natural disaster – Large and expensive natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern U.S. often get our attention as they make the headlines for network disruptions. However, severe storms, which are becoming more common, can also cause network outages, such as the storm that knocked out the National Weather Service radar systems in April of 2024. Having network redundancies must be a part of your strategy to ensure business continuity in the face of a natural disaster.
Human error – People make mistakes. On networks, the mistakes can simply be moving the wrong device or plugging in the wrong cable. Even network engineers who perform seemingly harmless tasks can cause network outages. In 2017, a British Airways engineer disconnected a power supply. When it was reconnected, a power surge caused a major disruption to their systems, grounding nearly 1,000 flights.
Implementing Network Redundancy: Key Strategies
Consider the following strategies when planning to build a redundant network.
Diverse pathways – several physical connections or multiple inbound and outbound connections will enable data to flow and reach all destinations if one pathway becomes unavailable. Diverse pathways can be enhanced by utilizing geographic redundancy as a part of your strategy.
Failover systems – systems that automatically switch to backup resources do so without human intervention. These systems typically rely on receiving a pulse or heartbeat from the primary system to know that it is active. If this signal is lost, the system will automatically switch to the redundant network and alert IT that this has occurred.
Load balancing – load balancers distribute network traffic across multiple links to reduce the risk of performance issues. During normal operations, load balancers can provide high performance and low latency. During an outage load balancers become critical as they will redistribute traffic on all available links, preventing further disruption.
Geographic redundancy – a popular business continuity strategy, geographic redundancy enables you to duplicate a network in a different region than your primary network. Physical distance between the primary and redundant networks will prevent local conditions (severe storms, power outages, etc.) from impacting the redundant system.
Case Study: Learn how Resilient Health used a mix of modern technology strategies to ensure a stable and resilient network.
Best Practices for Building a Redundant Network
Network redundancy can always be made better. Consider the following steps to strengthen your network’s redundancy:
Regular testing – building physical redundancy within the proper redundancy types is not enough. When faced with a real-world disaster or data loss, you must be sure that recovery will happen promptly. Start with writing a strategy of how testing will take place, and what will be tested. Consider expanding this strategy to ensure complete business continuity.
Continuous monitoring – modern network monitoring tools serve several purposes, the most important of which is to detect and address potential issues before they lead to outages. Traditionally, these tools were used to detect faults. However, they now provide information on the health of the network to maintain high availability and performance. Monitoring tools are broken down into several categories: availability, performance, traffic, and security. Consider all tools carefully before making any investments.
Documentation and training – documenting the redundancy strategy is more than creating a business continuity plan and keeping it handy. Consider documenting network architecture, such as network diagrams, as well as creating documentation that clearly shows the impact of an unavailable network link or piece of hardware. Make sure all documentation is regularly updated and versioned. As this documentation is published, make sure that the IT staff is aware of it and is properly trained to use these important guides should the need arise.
Vendor collaboration – working with reliable partners means so much more than cost efficiency. A proper vendor relationship can mean using network components that are higher in quality and will ensure that you receive components that are needed promptly. In short, it is risk mitigation. Consider making vendor partners a strategic part of business continuity to mitigate potential disruptions.
Ensuring Business Continuity with Network Redundancy
Network reliability, performance, and business continuity are top concerns for IT leaders, regardless of the organization’s size. These challenges are especially pronounced for small to medium-sized businesses that may lack the resources of larger enterprises.
As a trusted business partner, TPx can review your current network and suggest a proper network redundancy solution to protect your business. Get in touch with us to get started.