How resilient is your business?

By Ben Kitto: Head of Enterprise Acquisition for Retail, Leisure, Finance and Professional Services, Telefónica UK

Just how resilient is your business? Uptime and availability are key metrics for most businesses, due to the need to transact online and keep in contact with their customers 24/7. And resilience relies on strong communications.

The key to this is connectivity – and having reliable connectivity. A business can opt for an array of connectivity options from ISDN, to ADSL, to full Ethernet services – which are fine until you realise that all are cable-based, and rely on a communications operator running lines and services into your building. That means that they have the potential to fail. And it’s not just problems in the local exchange that you need to worry about – what about that considerate gentleman with a JCB just down the road, who inadvertently decides to turn your business-critical connectivity into Super Noodles!

“Ahah” I hear you say, “But we have backup lines to avoid this very problem – our provider has installed a resilient link for us. So we’re covered!”

Okay – that’s an excellent strategy and shows consideration for business continuity. But is that second circuit truly resilient? Perhaps you should ask yourself…

• Does it terminate in a separate cabinet in your building?
• Does it use a different cable duct out of your building down the road to the cabinet?
• Does it connect to a separate cabinet down another road?
• Does it go to the same network node?
• Does it…..blah blah….you get the picture

9 times out of 10, the answer I hear in response to these questions is is a stony silence followed by lots of “erms” and “maybes”.

That’s because true resilience is only possible when you have both a wired and a non-wired connectivity option. O2 Gateway provides customers with a single access platform that can offer all manner of fixed and cable connections, depending on what your business needs. And it offers seamless backup connectivity via our award-winning 4G Wireless network.

So to put it simply – a business with an O2 Gateway connection doesn’t need to worry, even when Mr JCB does his best to shred your fixed line connections. Our solution simply routes you onto our 4G services, where you can continue to take orders and communicate with your customers within seconds of the dreaded “Oh no!” from Mr JCB.

As a little test – just have a think about how your business would be affected if you lost service for half a day. What would that mean for you, your customers, or your shareholders? What about a full day…what about 2 days? These are all very realistic cases, and believe it or not ADSL connections can be offline for 5 days before they are fixed. This is a perfectly legitimate timescale for time to fix from a popular UK service provider, and means that your business will be left hanging for a whole working week.

So if you want true resilience for your business, think about O2 Gateway: the solution that keeps you up and running 24-7, irrespective of the day-to-day challenges of modern business connectivity. Visit our website to find out more.