Remote Teams and Business Continuity – Why COVID-19 Brought Failover into Focus

The impact of COVID-19 on our businesses has been considerable. Teams are moving to remote work, business are moving to e-commerce models, and yet customer support still needs to stay up – no matter what. All these changes have led to an inevitable strain on resources, particularly on local Wi-Fi connections. The result of this has been slower connections due to bandwidth demands, unpredictable outages of primary connections, and limited data usage with no backup. Fortunately, these conditions can be mitigated or prevented, and you can ensure business continuity by leveraging wireless failover.

Uninterrupted Operations

Wireless failover solutions may take a variety of forms, but generally rely on a redundant wireless connection that is used in the event of a failure or irregular closure of a default connection or network component. Brief network outages are certainly not uncommon, but the prolonged remote work environment brought on by COVID-19 is leading to an increased need for a backup solution. Wireless failover devices, such as Teltonika routers, can ensure coverage and protection of data and backup. This type of solution can provide invaluable peace of mind for those running mission-critical applications.

With a larger remote workforce than we have ever seen before, comes an increased need for advanced virtual private network (VPN) solutions and wireless backup. This helps keep remote employees active, no matter what happens, by failing over to wireless networks and backup internet connections when wired network outages occur.

Intelligent Traffic Routing

SD-WAN, which refers to a software-defined wide area network and is a cousin to software-defined networking (SDN), is a virtual WAN architecture that is managed through a centralised interface separate from its hardware. This results in greater visibility into which apps are using bandwidth and provisioning to give priority to high impact apps. This type of network management is critical at a time when limited bandwidth is in high demand.

In addition to increased visibility for network management, SD-WAN also has the ability to push traffic to the failover device when needed. By dynamically directing traffic through a mix of connections, businesses utilizing SD-WAN technology benefit from WAN connectivity that is reliable, secure, cost-effective, and fast.

Ensuring Business Continuity

Failover ensures  a higher level of business continuity. It increases up-time for critical applications such as VOIP, video conferencing, and others through reliable connectivity.

Even short disruptions in internet connectivity can lead to lost revenues, reduced employee productivity, and customer dissatisfaction. KORE failover solutions ensure business continuity by providing protection from costly network outages and increasing network availability.

KORE powers businesses with wireless networks that deliver 99.99% uptime through a choice of top tier cellular operators from leading carriers. Businesses can right-size their data plans based on application needs, as well as monitor and manage the performance of all carriers via a single connectivity management platform.

To learn more about how wireless failover can work for your remote teams, talk to a business continuity expert from KORE today.