Dual Internet Connections and the Cloud

If you’ve got everything in the cloud and you don’t really understand what the cloud is, you could be up for some strife. So what we’re going to talk about today is making sure that you have access to all of your stuff in the cloud, even if you don’t really understand it.

Account Applications

One of the main things that people put in the cloud is their account applications. One of the other things that they pop into the cloud is their core business applications, the things they use day in and day out. They don’t take into account:

• the ongoing costs that it can cost each month

• the costs of the additional infrastructure to support it

• the cost of the downtime because they didn’t buy the additional infrastructure

So one of the things you need to make sure is if you’re using business-critical applications and they’re not stored locally with some sort of timed guarantee or managed service agreement that you have. You need to make sure that if there’s no continuity agreement in place that you have multiple internet connections come to the premises. Maybe you’ve got one with Telstra and another one with Optus. Maybe one’s got Vodafone as a 4G carrier coming into the building and then you’ve got Optus and Telstra. Maybe one’s got five into the premise and the other ones running off a different technology. You want to have them load balancing or in failover arrangement.

Back Up Plans Are Great

This means that if a provider goes down, you’re still sweet because you’ve got your internet and everything’s connected. If two providers go down, you might be having problems depending on how much redundancy you put in place there. However, you’re still probably going to be okay if you’ve gone for a third wireless option in there.

The chances of three going down mean you’re probably not going to be doing much with your business. The area’s probably under water or on fire. Or some other apocalyptic type arrangement that has happened with nature.

Don’t Skimp on Them

You don’t just want to go the cheap home grade TPG connections that set you back $70 a month. You need something that’s going to be business grade, where they give you an uptime guarantee and back that financially if it goes down. There are plans through companies such as Exetel, Telstra, Internode, IINet, and I know said bad about TPG earlier but there are business grade plans with them also.

In Australia, you’re going to be talking at about $600 to $1200 dollars for the plan. You might be baulking at that. If you want to be operating a real business and you’re wanting to make sure that the infrastructure that you’re using isn’t going to be going down, you need to go some business internet connections. They will give you the data and the bandwidth and the integrity and the uptime that you require.

It’s Simple Math

It comes down to simple math. If you’ve got everything in the cloud and something goes wrong, and you’ve got 10 employees and you’re paying them $20 dollars an hour each. The Internet goes down for two days, which is $3,200 dollars that it will have cost you in downtime just in the staffing costs. Now hopefully, the staff aren’t just sitting there not making you money. If you’re paying them $3,200 dollars every two days anyway, you’d be hoping that they’d bring you in at least $6,000 dollars. So that’s not only the outgoings of $3,000 odd dollars, it’s also the incomings of $6,000 for a total deficit of $9,000 dollars in two days that could be comfortably avoided by having better infrastructure.

The Final Word

Should you move your business to the cloud? If you’re operating in your mum’s garage, it’s not a problem. If you go down for a day and it’s just you, you can probably just tether to your mobile phone or something like that. However, if you are paying employees you want to make sure that you’re going to have your uptime, put that into account when you’re going towards a cloud application. You need to be spending more money on the internet and infrastructure. Or move to Japan where you can get the $600 – $700 dollar plans that we do in Australia for about $50 dollars. I hope this has been helpful, and if you have other questions, contact Dorks Delivered. Stay good!

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