Category Archives:

25 Aug

Disaster Strike Anytime – Be Prepared

World events in the last few years teach us that at any moment a disaster could strike.  A smart IT Systems Manager would have built a business continuity plan into his scheme of operations, by providing for a sound, tested disaster recovery plan.  What are the essential features of a sound Disaster Recovery Plan?

 Preserve Data:

 For any reason if the business network fails, then the data it contains as well as continuity of data is of paramount importance to restore normality of operations.

 Data Backup:

 For businesses which handle a large volume of data, hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups may not be enough for effective disaster recovery.  Ideally, data backup should be on a continual, real time basis.

 Detection of Disasters:

 The disaster may affect only one part of business operations but could have a domino effect.   Therefore, quick detection and recovery is important.  In-built diagnostic tools will alert the Systems Manager immediately.

Offsite Location:

 Having a back-up site at a different geographical location will help in disaster recovery in case the damage to the primary site is too extensive for immediate recovery.  The offsite location will give time to re-locate with minimal loss of business continuity.

 WAN Redundancy:

 More important than physical locations is the redundancy available in communication lines.  This is vital for business continuity and disaster recovery.  Seamless redundancy will ensure that business operations are not affected.

 Employee Training:

 Every employee should be given adequate training on the disaster recovery plan.  In the event of a crucial employee being incapacitated, there should be backups in the chain of command to take over.

 Disaster Recovery – Awareness and Attention:

 Complacency is the weakest link in disaster recovery and business continuity.  Employees should be constantly reinforced about the disaster recovery plan and its importance.  Regular drills should be a part of employee training.

 A disaster could strike any time.  A smart organization is prepared for the worst and will recover in the shortest possible time.

21 Aug

Key WAN Design Considerations for Cloud Connectivity & Business Continuity

It is hard to believe the Internet is over 25 years old.  During this time the world witnessed exponential growth in the Internet and with it Wide Area Networks (WANs).  Today business life would be unimaginable without WANs.  Commerce, emails, data transfer, information searched all depends on WANs.  Thus WANs are not only ubiquitous, they are vital.

All of us have experiences WAN outages (if you have not you are lucky!).  the moment this happens every employee is up in arms, productivity plunges, use of cuss words increase and in general the mood turns sour – and who gets blamed? – the network administration group.  The only other thing that is bound to get people even more upset is if the paycheck is not deposited on time!

Unfortunately, if a WAN is only connected by one data-line, and the line is cut or goes down, chaos results.  Even though the ISP has an SLA with you, it is only a promise that the network with be up a certain percent of the time. If not they pay a penalty while you incur the wrath of employees.  To avoid this, many network administrators introduce redundancy to WANs.  Redundancy can be achieved in many ways.  Multiple lines aggregated using BGP or FatPipe technology solves the problem.  BGP is arcane and requires a great deal of expertise while FatPipe technology is “set it and forget it”.  This paper will discuss discusses WAN redundancy and reliability and is a good starting point in ensuring you have a “high availability WAN”

Click HERE to download the white paper

18 Aug

Importance of WAN in Business

Wide area networks are an essential communication tool in modern day businesses.  Since it is one of the areas of high operational cost, a WAN should be designed carefully, so that costs and efficiency are optimized.  Since there are many competing technologies, choosing the appropriate WAN solution is imperative.

Many businesses opt for dedicated MPLS lines to connect each WAN node.  One of the main advantages is that MPLS lines offer excellent connectivity and quality, but the downside is that it is expensive.  To reduce costs, using IP based VPN [Virtual Private Networks] over inexpensive broadband connections is a good option.

Acknowledging the strategic importance of WAN connectivity to a business, care and thought should be put into its design.  An area that should never be neglected is being prepared for a WAN connection to fail.   If connectivity is lost, it could mean significant lost revenue and severe disruption to business processes.   The loss of customers and goodwill may never be recovered.  The business may even fold in such circumstances.  WAN redundancy should be a part of the design factors.

FatPipe technology was designed in such events and could mean the difference between a major problem and a mere blip in business operations.

14 Aug

Internet Routing Storm

Today was a slow day for many internet users.  Thanks to the failure of several core BGP routers, Internet traffic was spotty.  The reason for this is there were several problems with major ISPs and their routers.  Their routers, many of which can hold only 512,000 BGP routing tables, were overloaded and could not handle  more routing rules. BGP is the protocol used to track and share routes for sending data traffic. Level 3 was affected in a major way. Those who use VoIP saw a significant degradation in the quality of their VoIP traffic.  VoIP is sensitive to jitter and latency; today was the day when all the problems you can think of came to a head.

Those customers who used FatPipe products and had multiple ISP providers did not suffer as much.  Using FatPipe SmartDNS  on their premise allowed them to escaped the DNS meltdown that occurred at some ISP and backbone service providers.  When the core routers were not transmitting the traffic, FatPipe appliances were able to send the traffic to the right place. VoIP traffic was better handled as FatPipe managed the latency and jitter to route traffic in the best possible manner.

11 Aug

Top Pitfall to Avoid When Implementing Cloud Computing

I have been reading a lot about “Cloud Computing”.  Almost every networking journal, conference, seminar touches upon the subject.  Cloud services providers aver that the traditional premise based network will soon be obsolete and network administrator better jump on the bandwagon quickly.  They tend to overstate the benefits (as I would expect anyone selling anything to do) and brush aside some real concerns.  They admonish network administrators to stop wasting their time managing premise based networks.  “Move to our cloud service and relax while we do all the work”.  Really?

The premise of the argument is tempting and there is a place for cloud services.  Unfortunately, migration to the cloud is not as easy as flipping a switch.  As any savvy network admin knows, many issues have to be resolved before making such a move.

The biggest concerns are the security of the data you put on the cloud and connectivity to the cloud services.  While service providers strive to eliminate breaches, security breaches have been reports recently.  If your WAN is down and you cannot connect to the service provider, it will prove to be very costly in terms of lost productivity.  There are many others that should be weighed against the benefits before making the decision.

What I am advocating is a well thought out strategic process when making a decision to move to the cloud.  It is better to ask providers tough questions upfront rather than confront them later.  Some of the pitfalls in cloud computing are detailed in a white paper you can obtain here.

Click HERE to download the white paper