What is failover?
When you are working in your office chances are your computer is connected to a server, and to the internet. If your server failed, or the internet connection went down, you would struggle to do your work, right?
Failover is the term used to describe the automatic switching to a backup system. For example, you may have more than one server looked after by your IT team, but you don’t know or care about that. You click on a link for documents, and your documents are there. If server No. 1 crashes, server No. 2 takes over and the problem doesn’t affect your work. That is failover in action.
The same system can be set up for the internet. By having two internet connections supplied by two different providers, a fault with one connection won’t stop you getting online to work.
The more people you have in your office, the more important it is to have failover systems in place.
Why is it important?
You can probably see by now why failover is something your company should have, but here is a list of possible benefits:
- Greatly eliminate downtime as your users will be able to keep working through technical problems;
- Maintain great customer service as your clients won’t even know you have had a problem;
- It gives you time to solve a problem properly. Having a failover solution in place will allow you the proper time to fix your issue, without needing to rush to find a ‘Band-Aid’ fix;
- It can save you money. The cost of implementing a failover is often far less than the potential cost of the downtime, lost business, and damaged reputation caused by a system failure.
What happens if your server goes down? Are you still able to work? Is there a plan in place? Having a failover solution is something that every company needs to be thinking about and implementing. If you are interested in implementing a failover solution to improve your business, why not give one of our experienced consultants a call? We can make sure the services you choose meet the needs of your business.
