SMB Business Continuity: Only One ISP?

Early this week I wrote about the importance of backing up your business data. The “Backup” meme continues through the week with news of another sort — network failures on a grand scale. First we hear that the Middle East is off the Internet, apparently because someone dropped an anchor on a critical undersea cable, and then comes word that AT&T’s EDGE network fell off the edge in the Southeast and Midwest for large parts of Thursday’s business day.

Most of us don’t need to manage and maintain undersea cables, and it’s not like you can easily move your Blackberry from network to network, but failures like these point out that too many of us have single points of failure where they’re unnecessary. Think about your ISP: do you have a backup in case they have significant trouble? The router in many offices has a provision for fail-over, and sometimes that function has even been correctly programmed, but does it go to another node of the same ISP’s network? If so, you’re not getting the protection you want. If your ISP suffers a failure in their core routers, you could be left with no access if your fail-over hits those same routers.

Many ISPs offer low-cost plans at low bandwidths, and low bandwidth may be enough to keep your business limping along until your primary ISP makes repairs. Don’t be afraid to look to cable companies or the phone company’s DSL provisions as reasonably-priced backups for a higher-dollar commercial data line. Once you have the backup provisioned, remember that you need to test the fail-over at least twice a year so you know that it works — and what it’s limitation are.

“Business Continuity” as a discipline tends to focus on large enterprises, but the fact is that most small businesses have a much thinner margin of error than the big corporations. Spending a little time and a little money can help make sure that your business is still around on the far side of the next problem that hits your corner of the Internet.