The widespread outages yesterday with the BT network have highlighted the reliance many businesses have on their internet connectivity. With more data being relocated to ‘the cloud’ people frequently seem to forget their reliance on the bits of string which connect them to it. The most common things you can do to mitigate these issues are:

Install an additional internet line from another ISP. This won’t fix issues if there is large outage at an exchange but all of our clients who have BT and another supplier did not notice the downtime during this latest outage as both connections were seamlessly managed by their main internet router.

Mobile 3G/4G data. This removes the traditional landline services from the equation and provides data access from the local mobile phone cell tower. Many business level routers have the ability to use a 3G/4G SIM or dongle that can be used as a last resort. This method may not be suitable for people who need fixed IP addresses for services in their office such as email servers but for basic web browsing and accessing cloud-based email and services it should be fine for short periods.

Leased Lines (with an ADSL backup from a second provider). These are the higher end of the price range but rates are coming down all the time and for many businesses the fact that the line is for your sole use and the SLA’s are substantially better than conventional ADSL are leading many businesses to consider this option.

Regardless of the technologies implemented each business should have a contingency for this kind of outage which has been thought about and tested in advance so there is much less uncertainty when there are outages. Everything breaks eventually.