A growing number of businesses are embracing the cloud when it comes to vital business applications. But one of the most important concerns that many businesses have is ensuring their cloud connection can fully support their mission-critical applications and workloads. Fortunately, there are a number of ways in which organizations can work to make their cloud connections mission-critical ready.
Network Support
Today’s businesses use a wide variety of mission-critical applications, ranging from content management systems (CMS) and retail applications to file sharing programs and customer relationship management (CRM) software. It’s important to have a fast and reliable network that is capable of supporting all of these apps without any loss in speed or network uptime.
For any network to be mission-critical ready, it must offer high availability for:
- continuous and uninterrupted access;
- reduced latency to prevent long lag times and guaranteed processing time; and
- the security needed to protect data as it’s processed through the network.
A network service provider’s ability to accommodate these requirements should be spelled out up front in the provider’s service level agreement (SLA).
Network Security
While the cloud offers extraordinary convenience for businesses and their clients, it can also serve as a tempting access point for hackers to infiltrate a business network. Having the right safeguards in place is essential for keeping valuable data safe and sound. It all comes down to what the network service provider (NSP) can offer in terms of secure connectivity. Ideally, the NSP should offer private network connections in conjunction with public Internet, giving businesses greater security when it comes to their mission-critical apps.
Network Efficiency
NSPs must offer flexible, scalable bandwidth solutions capable of accommodating a broad range of bandwidth usage scenarios. Businesses should be able to scale their bandwidth up or down automatically without having to invest additional resources or experience downtime that could negatively impact their operations.
Businesses can get more for their budget by partnering with NSPs that offer usage-based billing, wherein companies pay only for the bandwidth they use during the billing period.
Proven Performance
No network can truly be considered mission-critical ready if it isn’t considered reliable. In turn, the partnering NSP must have a proven track record of excellent performance and reliability. It’s also important for the NSP’s customer support department to have the necessary knowledge and capability to correct any networking issue without incurring negative hits on performance or network uptime. Businesses should also factor in experience when selecting an NSP.
Remote Access
In the age of bring your own device (BYOD) and mobile computing, it’s important for employees to have remote access to mission-critical applications from virtually any location on the globe. With the right network in place, it becomes much easier to offer secure, fast access to critical apps at any given moment. An NSP capable of offering reliable local-to-global connectivity makes for a tremendously valuable asset.
Making networks mission-critical ready depends on how well businesses can execute their network strategy and how well they vet their NSP choices. To learn how eXemplify can help make your network mission-critical ready, contact one of our Cloud Strategy Consultants today.