This year, the Bay Area commemorated the centennial of the 1906 Earthquake and invariably conversations surfaced on disaster recovery and preparedness.
By Mary E. Shacklett
Published: July, 2006
This year, the Bay Area commemorated the centennial of the 1906 Earthquake and invariably conversations surfaced on disaster recovery and preparedness.
The major emergency readiness ingredients for organizations with critical technology and systems are disaster recovery plans and hotsites. While most organizations already have these, the idea of a dual ISP (Internet Service Provider) is still an emerging one.
From a disaster recovery aspect, the concept of multiple ISPs is a bit like insurance, said Sajit Bhaskaran, the chief technology officer of Aspen Networks (www.aspen-networks.com), a Silicon Valley-based provider of multiple ISP link network appliances. People don’t consider it until they’re hit.
Bhaskaran observed that recent disasters like Hurricane Katrina have demonstrated the value of businesses having more than one ISP. For example, organizations affected by Katrina that had wireless ISPs used in conjunction with VoIP continued to communicate with the outside world, even when their wired ISP links were down — and when other organizations in their area that did not have a second ISP were totally without communications. The experience gained from the hurricane has sensitized many IT decision-makers to the strategy of using multiple ISPs.
These corporate IT decision-makers also recognize that it is not only the threat of a disaster that makes a multiple ISP strategy valuable. For example, alternate pathways into different ISPs can guarantee a level of service that a single ISP might not be able to, and that’s good for business.
Today, the three main reasons that businesses consider multiple-ISP deployment are:
• Application Performance failure — a critical business application can fail because of its reliance on a specific ISP link. If the link is down, so is the application.
• Disaster recovery — if a primary ISP link fails, there is no communications recourse unless the business has an alternate ISP.
• Supplier Diversity with Multiple ISPs — bandwidth on the Internet has become a commodity, which makes it easier for companies to maintain a policy of supplier diversity.
Commonsense practice
The concept of using multiple ISPs is emerging as common practice — for better network traffic performance, for disaster recovery and business continuation insurance and for best cost deployment. New ISP switching technologies also enable organizations to get around the complexity of T1 line deployment and complicated firewall modifications.
If your company is considering a move to a multiple ISP environment, here are some recommendations and best practices:
• Set up your multiple ISP strategy to be as flexible as possible. The ability to automatically select the best ISP among two or three or four ISPs should be an option, as well as the ability for the user to specifically direct some applications to always go down a particular ISP path, with the only exception being when that ISP is down A combination of automated best path selection, as well as user policy overrides when needed, is the best approach. For example, if an ISP has been purchased for its ability to handle VoIP traffic in a special manner, then it would make sense to steer VoIP traffic that way.
• When you interview ISPs, be sure to ask them where they obtain their wholesale communications from. They should have multiple communications providers (e.g. Sprint, AT&T, etc.) to guarantee their own reliability.
• Maintain at least one wireless ISP in your ISP mix. The value of a wireless communications option was recently demonstrated in Hurricane Katrina. Similarly, an earthquake typically takes down all fixed-line services in its area of impact.
Mary E. Shacklett is President of Transworld Data, a marketing and technology practice specializing in marketing, public relations and product management for technology companies and organizations. Mary is listed in Who’s Who Worldwide and Who’s Who in the Computer Industry. She may be reached at (360) 956-9536 or TWD_Transworld@msn.com.
