I’ve had some email templates through that we should send out to our customers (which I’m not saying we’re not going to by the way) but the problem is, they’re talking about snow days and as the rain pours down for yet another day, I can’t see the imminent need to do this…
Coming from my hometown of Workington (there, I’ve admitted it), we’re worried about floods, having lost the use of our bridges for some time, and sadly a policeman killed on one of them whilst he was warding off oncoming drivers from using it. During this time almost half the town was cut off from the other. This just was not traffic that was cut off, but also disruption to power, utilities and the major annoyance – broadband.
Snow is nice, pretty stuff, it stays on the top of the ground and is almost benign unless you’re driving in it or your heating fails. However large ingresses of water into any property, town or city causes much more long term damage.
In Workington, there were two brave BT Openreach engineers, who also happened to be recreational divers who managed to get the equipment back on – strangely I remember hearing and reading about this at the time, but can find no trace of it on the internet right now!
What if you couldn’t get connectivity back?
If the floods receded from your business or even didn’t come close, how would you keep your business online if the main telecommunications network was damaged, even if just for a short time?
In the New Year, we’ll be promoting a new technology called Cradlepoint, again one of our acquisitions from the US, which allows routing over a 3G and 4G network that will address this problem. We’re very excited about being one of the first in the UK integrating this technology. For Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning, we feel there is no other solution that can match its performance.
Over the years we have used many solutions that purport to achieve a similar outcome, some from Cisco and some from DELL SonicWall – all good in their own way, but what we have seen is less of a driver to support all the 3G datacards available. We’ve been banging our heads trying to get certain networks dongles working on certain firewalls. Upon first look the Cradlepoint team have worked much harder to achieve device compatibility than other vendors and are focusing on this as their main technology instead of a extra add-on.
