Remember a few years ago when the massive blackout struck New York City and a large section of North Eastern U.S. Everything was shut down, the trains couldn’t move so people slowly streamed home and could not return back to work for a few days. Traffic lights were out so it became impossible to drive anywhere, let alone pump gas into a car. Having an internet outage in today’s business can have same crippling effect. Employees can not access email and messages shutting down a vital line of business related communication. Research grinds to a halt because the link to the information superhighway is severed. Inventory and databases can not be updated. Entire business can be shut down all because a single internet service provider provides lousy service.
Multi-Homing is a low cost way to guarantee that your business stays online. Most businesses use either a single LAN (local area network) or a single WAN (wide area network). By utilizing a second network, from a different service provider business’s can assure themselves of 24/7 link continuity and an uninterrupted link. This strategy is often called network redundancy, but it requires one step further to be fully implemented. Simply connecting two networks together can cause bottlenecks in bandwidth.
Multi-Homing technology is hardware that will balance the traffic between two networks. Often second networks are added to both add network redundancy and increase available bandwidth. Multi-Homing technology will not only balance the traffic between to two WANs or LANs but it will also optimize the traffic inside them. To see examples of benefits of Multi-homing technology and to see how cheap it can be, Radware.com offers the best examples of both.
Hopefully this article has increased your awareness of ways to protect and improve your network capabilities. Multi-Homing can not only fix your current network problems but it can also ensure the extended vitality your network for years to come. Make sure that you take the steps to avoid an internet blackout in your office.