Over the years, I’ve met technology leaders who successfully implement Ethernet as a diverse carrier to their incumbent Internet provider. These are technology-savvy customers who plan for contingencies and wisely act upon them. They understand in today’s connected world, real-time access to information is often critical to the success of an organization. A smart technology organization will mitigate risks of telecommunication outages by introducing a diverse data carrier.

Surprisingly, we also see technology leaders who understand the need for implementing diverse carriers, but they’re unable to sell their CFO or budget committee on approving the funds to mitigate the risks of network downtime.

Some question if it’s the technology leader’s business case that fails to “sell” the value of a diverse solution. Did the business case underscore the tangible losses and risks caused by an outage? Often, a denial of funds means the financial stakeholders perceive the risk of doing nothing as being less costly than making the financial investment in mitigating the risk of a disaster.

It often takes a major network outage to motivate the approval of funds to introduce the diverse carrier providing Internet, point-to-point and/or multi-point fiber connections.

We see a growing trend among healthcare providers, for example, who are doing right things right. Hospitals and clinics often transfer mission-critical patient data across diverse telecommunication provider networks. It is quite common for healthcare organizations to use our Ethernet plus another carrier network. Two of the most widely emphasized benefits are:

1. Utilizing diverse fiber carriers greatly mitigates the risk of downtime. Fiber in itself is extremely reliable, but it’s not invincible. For example: fiber can get cut by a landscaper or have a technical glitch in the router/switch that delivers service (though rare). Having two diverse fiber providers creates a physically and technologically resilient solution that almost certainly will not fail simultaneously.
2. The rise of “Big Data.” Certainly, data is growing exponentially and it’s not slowing down anytime soon. Having diverse fiber providers not only mitigates risks of costly downtime, but it also boosts bandwidth capacity to support bandwidth-hungry applications. Resources and applications can be allocated (load balanced) across the different provider networks, which can improve application performance and the overall end-user experience.

If all else fails and your CFO won’t support funding the network improvements needed to mitigate risks of network downtime… disable their network port, shut down their email and pull the plug on their desk phone for half a day. That should get their attention. Kidding of course. :) Happy selling!