Importance Of Network Redundancy
A quick overview of the topics covered in this article.
The Internet That Stays Up! – Network Redundancy
Did you know that global businesses lost around 60 million hours because of internet outages solely in 2018? Well, that’s a staggering figure, and since we are living in a world where your cloud services and communications make up the critical tools needed to engage in business, internet failover simply translates into monetary losses. Now, this is where redundant internet connections come in, so let’s see how they can help your business keep connected to the internet!
Importance Of Network Redundancy
A redundant internet works as an internet backup and balances the load of traffic, which means the internet keeps working if one internet goes out and will shift the traffic. Network redundancy is established by bringing in two or more internet connections into a load-balanced firewall. So, even if one network provider is affected, the other ones transform into a safety net, promising seamless broadband connectivity to the users. However, there are some essential components of network redundancy, including an HA firewall (High Availability) and load balancers.
Understanding The Concept of HA Firewalls
The HA firewall clusters are carefully designed to help minimize the downtime of critical systems with the help of a redundant system. It helps maximize the availability of the internet and other essential services with the help of clustering modes. The clustering modes include active/passive and active/active. In the active/active mode, various firewalls are enabled to share load throughout the cluster.
On the other hand, active/passive mode includes one standby-based firewall that’s enabled whenever the primary firewalls shut down. The ultimate goal of using an HA firewall is to eliminate the single failure points within the network infrastructure. Rather than using one firewall to protect the entire internet network, multiple firewalls are used in the form of clusters.
The firewalls sync with each other through a heartbeat connection that helps inform one firewall if the other goes down. In that case, the redundant firewall helps ensure seamless protection of the network without any interruption.
Understanding The Concept of Load Balancing
Load balancing is a well-known technique that helps distribute the traffic load on multiple connection lines (the connection lines are two or more). The load is evenly distributed to create a balanced network without any overload – it ensures that one connection isn’t stressed, promising optimal network operation.
This is important because the overloaded or stressed bandwidth results in slow loading that affects worker productivity and client-facing engagements. The basic working principle of load balancing is distributing the network load and client requests efficiently across different internet providers, resulting in a more stable and responsive network processing.
On top of everything, load balancing ensures network availability by maximizing the use of several internet connections for the best delivery of services. In addition, it delivers flexibility for adding, removing, and changing network configurations without causing downtime.
The most important benefit of using the redundant network and load balancing is that in times of high traffic, the load is separated across multiple pipes. In the event of a failure of one pipe, the traffic continues to flow. We have implemented this across the board for many clients, and support tickets for the internet going down have dropped to near zero.
The Bottom Line
In today’s cloud-connected world, the loss of internet connectivity equals a complete loss of productivity as businesses are brought to a standstill. We have been implementing load-balanced internet for over 15 years at client sites, and it has become a de facto standard to remain operational in today’s business world. The cost of implementing a network redundancy solution can be negligible, with modern internet providers supplying reasonably high speeds at very affordable prices. Many clients opt to go with a low-cost second internet like DSL or Coax, and they are glad they did it when suffering a long-term outage from a fiber cut or similar issue on their primary high-speed internet.
For free and reliable IT support for your business, get in touch with our Orlando IT Services company today!
