How Permaconn helps to deal with network outage risks

This comment piece by Andrew Pears, CEO of Permaconn, first appeared on IT Wire on 16th July. Visit www.itwire.com for more details.

"Telstra’s nationwide outage last week was a timely reminder that connectivity has become one of the most critical components of modern business infrastructure.

When the network failed, payment terminals stopped processing transactions, remote monitoring systems lost visibility, connected devices dropped offline, and organisations across the country found themselves unable to operate as normal.

For many, that represents a single point of failure.

The reality is that major nationwide outages are relatively rare. But smaller outages are not. Localised network disruptions occur every day as a result of maintenance, hardware failures, fibre cuts, weather events and congestion. Most are short-lived, but that doesn't make them any less disruptive for organisations that depend on always-on connectivity.

As businesses continue to digitise operations, connectivity is no longer simply an IT service. It underpins payments, cloud applications, remote asset management, building security, smart infrastructure, operational technology, IoT devices and customer services.

When connectivity fails, the impact quickly extends beyond the IT department and into day-to-day business operations.

There is, however, a blueprint that many industries have been following for decades.

Fire, security, healthcare and other critical infrastructure sectors have long recognised that communications cannot rely on a single carrier. Resilience is designed into these environments through redundancy and automatic failover. Rather than depending on one provider, they ensure an alternative network is always available so that if one carrier experiences an outage, systems automatically switch to another with little or no interruption.

It's a principle that every industry should now be adopting.

Retailers rely on connected payment terminals and cloud-based point-of-sale systems. Utilities depend on remote monitoring and telemetry. EV charging operators require constant connectivity to authenticate users and process payments. Manufacturers, logistics providers and local government all operate increasingly connected environments where even a brief communications outage can have significant operational and financial consequences.

The lesson is clear: resilience should no longer be reserved for critical infrastructure.

During this latest outage, organisations already using dual-network connectivity were largely able to continue operating without interruption.

Across Permaconn's customer base, thousands of connected devices automatically switched to an alternate carrier within moments of the outage, allowing operations to continue while many organisations relying on a single network experienced disruption.

The good news is that advances in networking technology have made automatic carrier failover significantly more accessible and cost-effective than many organisations realise. Solutions that were once reserved for large enterprises are now available to companies of all sizes, with a dual network service with both Telstra and Optus SIMs starting from as little as $10 per month.

Organisations rightly invest in cybersecurity, cloud resilience and disaster recovery planning. But this latest outage illustrates that connectivity resilience deserves the same level of attention.

Every outage, whether national or local, reinforces the same point: network availability should never depend on a single provider, and it doesn’t have to. Organisations that build resilience into their connectivity architecture today will be far better prepared for the inevitable disruptions another network outage will create."