One of the easiest and most common ways for a business to lose money is for the internet to go down in any offices or locations because most of the important applications businesses depend on are now cloud- and internet-based. According to BigLeaf, the average business internet connection experiences 3.5 hours of downtime and 23 hours of unusable internet per month. Is your business caught up with the digital times? 

Digitally transforming  

Creating reliable connectivity on the unreliable internet means rethinking the connectivity for the new needs of digital technologies. Digital transformation is key, here are three pillars to consider:  

• Resilient connectivity — Make sure there is enough capacity for all traffic with redundancy built in. This can include having two or more internet connections. 

• Real-time control — A system should be proactive and fix things in real time before an application fails and a complaint is registered. For example, having all internet connections working at once to direct traffic through the most efficient connection. 
• Operationalization — Provide IT with the visibility and alerting and troubleshooting tools they need to ensure the ongoing success of the connectivity and the digital technologies. This means seeing how the internet is being used, what applications need faster speeds, and so on.  

Just like SD-WAN, the steps to digital transformation vary depending on the business. Look below to see the key trends of digital transformations from 2022 to 2023. 

Socialize your disaster recovery plan   

Natural disasters and other setbacks out of one’s control, like power outages, take a business’s essential systems or internet down. A new analysis by a nonprofit research and technology group that assesses flood risks, and a commercial engineering firm, found that retail, office, and multi-unit residential properties stand to lose more than $13.5 billion in 2022 from flood damage. Of course, these natural disaster threats depend on where a business is located, regardless, natural disasters are out of human control. To recover quickly with the least amount of downtime, a documented disaster recovery plan should be put in place that a business and all its employees should be familiar with. A good disaster recovery plan should identify potential problems, spell out how to prevent or solve them, and make it clear what a team’s roles and responsibilities are.  

Consider partnering with a trusted partner 

If a business’s IT team is small or overburdened (or it does not exist), enlisting the help of a trusted partner can be a helpful way to improve uptime and allow experts to handle the issues. Many businesses have trusted partners who keep the technology they and their customers rely on working at all their offices or locations. 

Get there faster with SD-WAN and AI  

While a team can do many of these things to improve uptime on their own, it makes more sense to let an SD-WAN do the heavy lifting so a business can focus on other priorities.    

Access Tech understands that time is crucial for businesses. Staying on track and productive while experiencing the least amount of interruptions is how businesses are sustained. Knowing how to handle these setbacks and interruptions keeps a business successful. As a company who works remotely, we rely on the internet to perform our daily and essential functions. From file sharing, video conferencing and more, the internet is our gateway to keeping Access Tech running smoothly. SD-WAN provides us with the ability to video, email, file share, and more with no interruptions. Contact us at Access Tech for a free 15-minute call with our network engineer to talk about the readiness of your company for SD WAN and the risks versus benefits. We can then offer you the best support and guidance to update your business’s uptime. We have been helping customers for years connect business strategy to IT solutions.