What Exactly Is Network Redundancy?
A network redundancy plan, also known as a disaster recovery plan, identifies the critical network components whose failure would result in significant outages.
Redundancy allows your network, servers, and internet connectivity to remain operational in the event of a failure with these various communications links or devices by providing alternative communications paths and backup equipment.
Typically, network redundancies apply to:
- Servers
- Networks
- Internet Connectivity
Why Is Network Redundancy Necessary?
Unplanned network outages cost organizations nearly $15,000 per minute. While direct costs are obvious to an organization, indirect costs, such as reputational damage or lost productivity, can have a significant impact on business operations. Creating network redundancies, backed up by a disaster recovery plan, will help to eliminate or reduce downtime costs.
Direct Cost
The direct cost of carrying out a specific activity. Direct costs would include the cost of detecting and controlling the incident, potential equipment damage, and the cost of third parties contracted to assist in the resolution of an unplanned outage.
Indirect Cost
The amount of time, effort, and other organizational resources expended, but not in monetary terms. Indirect costs include the time it takes to recover lost or damaged mission-critical data, as well as lost user and IT productivity.
Opportunity Cost
The cost of lost business opportunities as a result of the outage’s reputational damage. Lost revenues and business consequences are examples of opportunity costs. The inability of current and potential customers to access core systems such as VoIP or email during the outage period results in lost revenues. A business could suffer reputational damage, customer churn, and lost business opportunities as a result of an outage.
What Are the Various Kinds of Network Redundancies?
In order for businesses to run smoothly, it’s critical to avoid situations where the internet connectivity is down and then wondering what other consequences resulted from a network failure.
To accomplish this, IT operations should expand their disaster recovery and business continuity plans to include redundancy in their servers, networks, and internet connectivity.
Among the various types of network redundancy are:
- Multiple Spanning Trees (MST)
- Ring Networks
- Diverse Trunking
- Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)
Choosing the best redundancy model can be difficult, which is why we’ve broken down the various types of network redundancies to help you make the best decision for your network.
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