By Kirk Drake | February 19, 2013

What should Credit Unions use for a Backup Circuit?

Credit Union Backup Connectivity

If you don’t believe in having backup or contingency plans – then you probably won’t find this post useful. However, if you are looking for options for a backup circuit to your primary Internet circuit this will help you to be informed of your options.  The most important consideration for a backup circuit is diversity.  You should not only consider a different carrier but the delivery medium and path are major considerations as well.

There are numerous different carriers/providers of Internet connectivity that can act in a backup capacity; DSL, cable, satellite and cellular are some of the options that are currently available.  When selecting a backup solution you must make sure it will support your needs, but as this is a backup, you will most likely want to lower your overall expectations to save some money.

Diversity

Diversity is the most important of any backup circuit design.  If your current Internet provider also provides other services such as DSL or cable look else where for your backup to ensure that you have diversity of the last mile.  If the backup is delivered across the same last mile and your primary service is disrupted you are almost guaranteed to have lost your backup as well. Generally you can determine this by asking the carrier to provide details as to which CO (central office) they will be using.  If both carriers use the same CO – then you don’t really have diversity.

Reliability

Reliability and speed are key as well, you should chose a reliable proven technology, DSL and cable are the  options with proven track record but that does not count out the other options.  Speed is important in the world where response time is crucial to any business.  Email can contain megabytes of information and hosting online banking can take a chunk out of your bandwidth.

Single Points of Failure

Once you have selected your backup solution you will need to then make sure that you have the router in place to support dual Internet connections as most routers will not come out of the box with this option. There are numerous devices with pricing at all pricing tiers but you should only consider a device that will allow for fail-over to your backup without any intervention.

 Click here for an article on strategies to eliminate Single Points of Failure

Paying for multiple connections can provide additional bandwidth that can be used in non-emergency situations by configuring connections to load share but this might require outside expertise to configure your router.

DNS Considerations

Lastly, you need to keep in mind that domain name service (DNS) is used to route traffic to a particular IP address over a particular link and as most traffic includes a domain name you can control which link is used to reach your network by changing the IP address that is returned in and DNS look up call.  If you have the hardware with built in DNS servers that respond to changing conditions you can stop serving IP addresses that are associated with a down link and offer a secondary IP address across the active link.

The technology to provide a backup service to your end users is available and now is the time for businesses of any size to seek a redundant connectivity solution and is could pay for itself to your reputation even in a short-lived Internet outage.

Click here to learn more about your Credit Union Branch Connectivity options

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