In Part 1 of this blog I described your typical organisation and their approach to Internet and Network Redundancy. This document describes how the common redundancy solutions could be costing the organisation thousands of dollars and how this can be mitigated using intelligent network solutions.
So you have managed to get your solutions in place and your network is adequately protected. Any failure in your main link will be covered by the secondary link without hitches.
That sounds great but should you be resting easy? Knowing that there might be a better way to accomplish the same feat or that your secondary link has never been tested so you can never be sure of how the network would respond in case of a catastrophe.
Can you afford to run failover tests every evening out of hours in order to test the backup link?
Do you bring staff back into the office over the weekend to verify everything is working fine? You can use monitoring solutions for these tests. Or can you? What are these monitoring solutions actually testing?
As you can see this issue is not simple and there are many permutations. I think the worst case is when your primary link fails only to find that the secondary link has also failed or was never tested.
It is worth mentioning that if your organisation can sustain loss of connectivity and outages whilst your staff are forced to do alternative jobs then these words certainly do not apply but if you want to know more stick with me.
The ideal solution is to use both the primary and secondary links to carry your network traffic simultaneously. You are paying for it so why not. Furthermore, you will instantly notice if there is a degradation of service.
Your business can be clever with this solution by using the combined, primary and secondary, bandwidths to meet the need only one link is currently fulfilling.
For example, if your primary link provides 5Mbps throughput and the secondary link delivers 5Mbps but you only use one link at a time. This suggests your business need is only 5Mbps.
In this case, you reduce your subscription from 5Mbps to 2.5Mbps for both your primary and secondary links. Crudely, you will effectively half your cost.
Bonding and using both links simultaneously (i.e. primary - 2.5Mbps and secondary - 2.5Mbps), you are effectively paying half the amount but getting the same service of 5Mbps.
This is one of the true benefits and secrets of Internet Broadband Bonding. It seems so simple but not many organisations are aware bonding or aggregation can deliver what they want at a lower price.
This is the age of being streamlined and using limited resources efficiently. A market like Nigeria is definitely ripe for this solution and is the only way to achieve the level of reliability our businesses deserve.
Key Benefits?
1. Cost-Saving.
2. Ensure you are never offline.
3. Security
4. Reliability of service
Essentially, with an internet bonding solution you can achieve very close to the five nines 99.999% availability.
Internet bonding should not be confused with network load-balancing which is an entirely different technology and never gives you the benefit of the combined network links.
So, my company is the supplier of the market-leading Internet Bonding solution manufactured by a German company called Viprinet. To consider some of the use cases that are most pertinent to organisations and Internet Service Providers see a couple of details below:
Cost-Saving
If we consider a typical African business where they can afford a dedicated 10Mb main link and 5Mb backup link. With a Viprinet VPN 300 Router this organisation can combine both links to create a combined link of 15Mb. If 10Mb is sufficient then they can, in turn, reduce the 10Mb link to 5Mb and utilise the combined primary and secondary link to maintain connectivity at 10Mb for the business.
Security
With patented Viprinet technology, each data packet is split down all available links and transported to a central hub via encrypted VPN tunnels. The implication of this is that your data is even more secure as no one can steal the data in transit and make sense of the transmitted information. In case you missed it - that is packets split, encrypted and tunnelled via VPN to a hub. This is a whole new world of networking which is not complicated to learn but is quite ingenious in the way it is implemented. Feel free to contact me to arrange a free trial.
Part 1
bluhivemedia is the sole provider of Broadband Bonding solutions, based on Viprinet technology, to Nigeria, Ghana and other West African nations. We have successfully implement this solution with many clients around the world. Our solution is considered by many to be the only option for bridging the digital gap for Africa. Contact us to know more.
- Uwa Ujam. (CEO)
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