How to Reduce Your Risk of Network Downtime

When the network goes down, all eyes are on you. Downtime means lost business, lost revenue, more overtime, and lots of stress spread between you and all your stakeholders. 

So, what can you do to reduce exposure to network downtime? Engineer the *perfect* setup. Here’s what we mean. 

Common Causes of Network Downtime

In an ideal world, you’d have 100% uptime. Even 99% uptime means there are still days when something in your network breaks down. 

When you think about issues that trigger network downtime, there are obvious causes, like a natural disaster or power outage. Other common causes of network downtime include:

• Human error: IT professionals are people, too. 
• Software or hardware failure: Security threats, overheating, corruption, or mechanical malfunctions can occur at any time.
• Configuration errors: Badly configured switches or routers can kill operations for any amount of time.
• Cybersecurity attacks: It’s impossible to stay on top of every threat, but with well-engineered firewalls and redundancies, you can get pretty close.
• Software updates: Updates are supposed to make everything better, right? It’s debatable… In reality, completing software updates has caused exponentially more problems. We’ll explain more below.

When Do You Really Need a Software Update?

When it comes to making software updates within your access layer, the majority of network managers live by the motto, “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t need fixing.” If your network equipment is in place and running and working as it should, updating software for the sake of updating software significantly increases your exposure to downtime.

There. We said it. 

Network equipment is primarily solid-state. Once it’s working, it will continue to work until something fails. There’s a low failure rate on solid-state electronics. At Edgeium, we stress the ability to leave your software in place and run it until there is an issue — this way, everything is static. If you keep changing software, we guarantee it will break something upstream or downstream, and reverting changes = downtime. 

We know we’ve been taught to keep systems up to date, but switches aren’t like the operating system on your PC. Constantly updating devices is downtime in itself with reboots and people on standby to make sure nothing fails. 

Think about it this way: Even 20-year-old Catalyst 3550s are still functional.

Benefits of limiting your network device software updates

• Save on labor: You can’t just reboot a switch — you have to pay overtime because they occur after hours. 
• Reduce downtime risk: You don’t know what an update will affect upstream or downstream. It could break something in one location but not another. 
• Minimize stress: If you don’t conduct network device software updates, you don’t have to worry about anything we’ve already mentioned bringing down your network. 

Preventing Network Downtime

Rather than reducing your network outages, let’s aim to avoid them altogether! The key to this is creating redundancies. Do you have a fallback if one of your systems fails? Do you also have spare equipment in the event of breakage? 

These redundancies limit your downtime exposure to minutes rather than days.

Start by looking for points of failure and lack of redundancy points: 

• Do you have redundant internet providers?
• Are two routers running in high availability (HA)? 
• Are you running firewalls in HA and backing up the network?
• Do you have redundant links between all routers, firewalls, and switches?
• Do you have hot spare equipment on hand? 

At Edgeium, the biggest value we offer is our experience and our ability to design networks around business requirements — not the latest and greatest technology. 

For example, the best solution may be a previous-gen switch, not a new one. You can decide to purchase the latest switch and pay a premium, or you can buy two units from Edgeium and engineer a fully redundant solution. The key is having someone on the front end who can help architect a fully redundant network while reducing costs.

The Edgeium Difference

We have experience with most OEM channels and make suggestions based on business needs and the best fit, not simply the most recent items released from the OEM.

In addition to the latest and greatest, Edgeium provides secondary market hardware, which gives us the flexibility to design your network using previous-gen hardware if needed. Lastly, our CovrEDGE maintenance  can save you 50%-60% annually compared to SMARTnet.