Network downtime costs businesses an average of $5,600 per minute. Depending on the business, that can add up to anywhere from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour.
And downtime repercussions aren’t just monetary. Outages can prevent customers from accessing the valuable information and services they need, depleting their trust, damaging company reputation and possibly driving customers to take their business elsewhere. Even seemingly small disasters, such as a brief and localized power failure, can leave your IT team scrambling.
Internet-based networking (IBN) helps businesses improve their disaster recovery plans with reliable automation and AI-based decision-making. With an intelligent network, you can automate disaster recovery, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity.
The Typical Approach to Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
Disaster recovery plans are typically part of a larger business continuity plan. A thorough recovery plan addresses factors such as:
- The environment. Are there back-up controls in place to keep your server rooms at an appropriate temperature? What physical security protocols are in place, and will those be compromised in the event of a disaster?
- How will you reconfigure and adapt the network if hardware is compromised?
- What applications need to be restored first? Who will restore them?
- Internet connectivity. How will connectivity be rerouted or restored if sites are down?
- Data restoration. How is data being backed up? Are those back-ups viable?
A typical approach to disaster recovery draws heavily on your IT team and requires clear communication and swift action. IBN builds on these principles, improving them with AI and machine learning.
Automating Disaster Recovery
IBN automates disaster recovery by:
- Developing and implementing back-up policies based on disaster recovery goals defined by an administrator.
- Self-healing the network during an outage to minimize downtime.
- Suggesting actions for system administrators to take, based on network conditions.
IBN works in a loop. System administrators input their intent, which IBN translates into policies, which it implements and enforces through machine learning and AI. The network then monitors itself, and when it detects suspicious or abnormal activities, it takes steps to adjust and correct. The network continually takes in activity input to understand what’s normal and what’s cause for alarm, strengthening its policies and decision making as it takes in new information. If needed, the network alerts administrators of issues or outages and provides suggested steps for troubleshooting.
For example, part of your disaster recovery plan may include storing data at a secondary site. System administrators would define this back-up plan, and the network would take steps to ensure data continually backed up to that site automatically. If that site is only for disaster recovery, IT teams may not notice if it goes offline. An intent-based network, however, would notice and alert IT to the issue, allowing them the time and foresight to take alternative data back-up measures.
An intelligent IBN understands your intent and translates into actionable steps. This is critical when a disaster occurs, and can reduce recovery time from weeks to days or even hours. And if every hour of downtime costs the business hundreds of thousands of dollars, that means IBN can save businesses millions – per outage.
Implementing Automated Disaster Recovery
Cisco’s IBN solutions are based on decades of expertise. Organizations of every size use Cisco IBN to minimize downtime and ensure they can bounce back if a worst-case scenario occurs.
Acadia Technology Group is a proud Premier Cisco Partner. We help organizations assess their current network infrastructure and implement best-of-breed IBN solutions. To learn more about IBN, check out IBN overview.
