16 November 2020
By Alan Stewart-Brown, VP EMEA, Opengear
For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), managing a network is a big responsibility. Availability is the top priority in order to provide customers with constant access to critical applications that help to ensure their businesses are able to function. When a network goes down this can be due to a variety of causes such as cyberattack, hardware failure or human error and the result of this downtime can cost enterprises over $100m loss in revenue a year.
The need for network resilience has become even greater during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even with lockdown measures easing and offices beginning to re-open, many employees who have adapted to working from home are continuing to do so. The requirement to work from home has placed increased strain on networks and a heightened sense of importance on seamless connectivity. With some businesses choosing to switch permanently to a hybrid model where workers can choose to work from home or the office, it seems the need for MSPs to ensure greater resilience and uptime may be here to stay.
Surges in demand and increased network traffic from the remote working revolution and the switch to the hybrid model could potentially cause an increase in outages. A scaled-back workforce could make dealing with the increased network traffic and demand more challenging for MSPs and could also provide hackers with exploitation opportunities.
The consequences of downtime
The pandemic isn’t the only threat to network uptime. Network outages were a very real threat to service levels prior to the pandemic and, without the right solutions in place, they could continue to be a significant threat as the world continues to adapt to the new normal.
While there is constant investment and improvement of network reliability and robustness, there is always a chance that a hardware failure from software updates or misconfiguration, through to database faults can lead to downtime. Depending on the severity of the fault, that downtime can last for days. Even in the best-case scenario where downtime might last only a couple of minutes, the impact on the enterprises relying on the affected network can be serious.
Downtime can have many negative impacts on enterprises, from huge revenue losses, to damaged customer relationships leading to reputation damage, to loss of productivity. Worse still, the momentary loss of business-critical applications that rely on an affected network can bring enterprises to a grinding halt. In this scenario, the loss of data from that application can result in legal and financial headaches.
In such scenarios, relationships between enterprises and MSPs they once relied on can quickly turn sour as network outages are often a breach of Service Level Agreements. Some enterprises might seek financial recuperation from the MSP while others might look to change providers completely. For MSPs, this can result in more than losing valuable customers – it can also have a negative impact on their reputations.
Protecting SLAs with exceptional connectivity
Every MSP knows full well it needs to ensure uptime for customers. MSPs also know that maintaining uptime is key to improving margins and meeting Service Level Agreements. Guaranteeing uptime, even during an outage, and exceeding customer expectations comes to down to implementing the right solution that can provide the visibility and the ability to remotely manage infrastructure from multiple vendors.
The right platform should allow MSPs to manage their critical infrastructure remotely without having to rely on expensive ‘feet on the street’ or issues around travel restrictions and reduced site access. This means implementing a solution that includes smart out-of-band (OOB) management, which provides an independent management network that allows secure access to the MSPs critical devices. This will provide engineers with ‘virtual’ direct access to infrastructure around the clock and will facilitate faster fix times. The platform should operate separately from the network management plane, providing engineers with an advanced OOB console server connected to all the critical equipment at each location and a centralised management portal. This will give engineers access to manage, monitor the MSP’s IT infrastructure, anticipate network issues and resolve them remotely, removing the requirement to travel out to sites where issues are occurring.
Now, more than ever, MSPs need to ensure uptime using a proven solution that will guarantee reliability and the network resilience that their customers expect. Investing in a platform that provides always-on access to customer devices at all times and allows engineers to manage everything from one central location, will help to accelerate fix times, meet SLAs, reduce costs and exceed customer expectations.
