Life comes to a halt without internet… – there is a solution
A stable and reliable internet service is indispensable for a company’s operation. Since the pandemic, we have learned that even the most basic activities can be performed online, whether it’s company meetings, online banking, or e-administration services. Interview with Szabolcs Flink, the Chief Technology Officer of Vannet
To select the right internet, our company needs to consider several factors. These include internet bandwidth, speed, available technology, and annual uptime.
From a technological standpoint, companies primarily prefer wired solutions, especially optical connections. However, where this service is unavailable or too costly to implement, there are options for various alternative, wireless connections, whether based on microwave technology or satellite connections, which are accessible anywhere in the country.
SLA, or Service Level Agreement, plays a significant role in various sectors. In this case, the contract between the service provider and the customer regulates and determines the level of service availability that the provider must continuously provide. SLAs typically cover service quality, service availability, and the provider’s responsibility. In the case of residential packages, for example, this can lead to higher troubleshooting times (usually up to 72 hours). Business solutions offer higher levels of availability and much shorter troubleshooting times. For leased line services, the service level is the highest, and they can even guarantee a troubleshooting time of up to 4 hours.
For companies where downtime is almost unacceptable, it is advisable to subscribe to secondary, so-called backup internet services and use various solutions to terminate the two separate internets in one device. If the primary service fails, the other (or even third) internet can take its place. When using backup services, we need to consider requesting secondary services through infrastructure different from the existing internet. For example, we can combine optical internet with microwave, satellite or mobile internet.
It is advisable to proactively arrange backup internet services because when a problem occurs, the outage can cause significant damage, compared to the negligible cost of a backup internet service.
In cases where production/service provision stops due to an internet outage, or employees become unable to work, backup services are essential. We can consider this as insurance, which ideally we don’t need, but when we do, it can save us a lot – with the difference that the backup internet can be used as long as the main line is working.
It is worth periodically reviewing and adjusting the internet services necessary for our company comprehensively to rapidly changing business processes, as there is more and more data, almost everything happens online, and even production machines require online communication.
At VANNET, we think ahead and occasionally initiate consultations with our clients to choose the best and most secure internet service for them.
(The article originally appeared in the April 5th, 2024 edition of the Southern Transdanubian Economy.)
