This article was sponsored by Multapplied Networks, a leading SD-WAN enabler.
On May 29th, a Pennsylvania-based healthcare provider experienced a bout of unplanned network downtime, rendering its electronic health record (EHR) system and patient portal inaccessible.
Seven of the company’s hospitals—including its call center—were affected by the outage, which delayed medical procedures and prevented physicians from accessing important patient information. Patients, too, were unable to obtain physician notes, appointments and medical histories during the outage.
As this example shows, unplanned network downtime can bring an organization to a standstill. In a mission critical environment, like a healthcare facility or emergency response center, the consequences can be significant. Downtime can directly harm patients, and lead to a string of negative consequences.
What’s the Cost of Downtime?
For organizations operating outside of the realm of healthcare, the cost of network downtime can be astronomical. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is about $5,600 per minute, or $300,000 per hour. Downtime can impact everything from retail POS systems, to sales and marketing teams, to research & development, to the C-Suite—and everything in-between.
In today’s ultra-connected world, downtime usually means paying workers to drink coffee until IT restores the outage. It leads to lost time, lost productivity, and lost profits.
Of course, the cost of network downtime will vary significantly, depending on a company’s size, market, average customer volume and the time of the year. For smaller organizations, it should be noted, the costs associated with downtime can be so outrageous that it can be difficult or even impossible to rebound. Many smaller organizations wind up going out of business within just a few months following a prolonged outage.
How SD-WAN helps
The trick to eliminating network downtime is to establish seamless failover across the network. This is something that can be accomplished using Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN).
Multapplied’s SD-WAN, for instance, was designed to be used with dual or multi-ISP WANs. With Multapplied, it’s possible to combine two or more internet circuits, resulting in a system that offers combined availability and stacked bandwidth, with 99.99 percent uptime or greater depending on the number of circuits per site. When the Multapplied algorithm detects circuit failure or dropped data packets, it will direct packets to other available circuits. Multapplied can be used to combine any variety of circuits from one or more carriers.
So, consider this: You next network outage could happen at any time, and for any number of reasons. Do you have a reliable failover system in place?
To learn more about Multapplied, contact our team today.
Alex Caw is a Sales & Marketing Associate at Multapplied Networks.
