Every company faces those moments when the Internet in the office will go down. A network outage can equate to thousands of dollars in losses, from unproductive employees to lost sales. We often wonder how we dd this before the Internet. Even with a team or individual in charge of restoring a broken connection, there is still likely to be some downtime as the problem gets resolved. In this post, we’ll cover some of the troubleshooting behind a network outage as well as what you can still achieve offline.
Look for Partial Outages
Sometimes only certain elements of the network fail, such as the VoIP system. The IT department should look for such partial network outages and try and troubleshoot them.
Contact Your Managed Services Provider
Don’t forget about the remote support your unified communications provider or managed services partner offers. Many times, your remote telecom support personnel can identify and resolve the connectivity and other IT issues quicker than internal IT can diagnose the problem.
Set Up Virtualization and Cloud Servies
It may take time to get a secondary connection up, and the servers and networks replicated for work. Your company can avoid replication downtimes by setting up virtualization and cloud services and conducting business in the cloud. With cloud services, your business resumes as soon as the secondary network is available.
Make Use of Offline Syncing
While your employees wait for your connection to be restored, they can still be productive offline. Many organizations use apps that sync online but often don’t think about network outages. The good news is, many apps today also have offline syncing capabilities. When choosing a new managed service app or developing one yourself, consider offline syncing. Many applications today have offline syncing capabilities that are often available as premium apps. Talk to your managed service partner about these features and select options that support business continuity. These premium features usually do not cost very much and have the ability to save data locally until a network connection is restored.
Google Docs, a much-used app among knowledge workers, has an offline feature that allows you continue working even when the Internet goes down. However, you must set this feature up before the network loss. Many other applications and software behave in the same manner so companies must plan for and train knowledge workers for offline events so that when the Internet goes down, productivity can stay high until connectivity is restored.
