Guarantee your commercial success with 100% uptime certainty

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Guarantee your commercial success with 100% uptime certainty

A 2018 Ofcom study, conducted by researchers at BDRC, uncovered worrying evidence that UK SMEs “tend not to place much faith in the SLAs in their communications contracts.”

The report states that its research suggests the “knowledge and awareness of communications SLAs amongst SMEs is very low indeed.”

Looking deeper, it’s clear that this is a story of weary resignation rather than plain ignorance. That’s because SMEs cannot afford to be carefree about what their SLAs say. Communications uptime is the oxygen of today’s digitally-driven businesses. According to Gartner, downtime costs on average £4,300 ($5,600) per minute.

Channel partners must maximise credibility and earn trust

The general view volunteered by firms in the study appears to be that SLAs aren’t worth the paper they are written on unless you are a major organisation. The idea that, in the event of an outage, their broken connectivity would be prioritised for repair is deemed “simply not credible.”

Such a lack of faith has major ramifications for the industry as a whole. Advisors and consultants in the IT and comms channel face an uphill battle to convince sceptical customers that their promises are meaningful. The opportunity is to replace scepticism with satisfaction and stand apart from the competition.

Make no mistake, the stakes are very high – both for SMEs and the ecosystem of technology partners who serve them.

This is why Luminet introduced its 100% Always On service, available direct or via approved partners. At its heart is resilience across the network, from redundant core to diverse last mile connections.

Certainty: the most precious commodity in post-Brexit London 

Businesses of all kinds crave certainty. Political and economic certainty has been a rare commodity in recent times, disrupting long-term planning and strategic investment.

But certainty comes in simpler forms – the certainty that employees will be able to work, that customers will be able to access goods and services, that you can trade, communicate and collaborate with the world. All of these certainties disappear when downtime occurs.

SLAs need to deal in 100% certainty rather than ‘hoped-for’ aspiration. Businesses and partners need to think less in terms of how to emerge unscathed from unexpected downtime and more about how to ensure downtime never happens in the first place.

But 100% is a heck of a thing to live up to. The word percent comes from the latin per centum,which literally means “for (each) hundred” or simply “of a hundred”. Hence, 100% is the big daddy of all percentage figures. And talking uptime in terms of 100% success makes ANY smaller number look like a compromise. 

Inside the edge and core architecture of the Luminet network, where 100% uptime has been continually achieved for the last 9+ years and counting, resilience is assured by fully mirrored, redundant and diverse hardware and software. Independent tier 1 interconnects out to the internet provide an additional layer of resilience while, at the other end of the network, further resilience is assured at the on-premise router, removing a critical point of failure.

 

Productivity is the prize for the always connected enterprise

Speaking of percentages, earlier this year Luminet conducted its own analysis of how connectivity outages impact enterprise productivity. According to recent surveys, 89% of organisations had experienced some kind of disruption in the preceding 12 months, while “the internet going down” and “slow internet” ranked first and second among the biggest productivity constraints experienced by SMEs.

The key to avoiding these issues is, as highlighted above, resilience – mostly in the form of diversity.

Instead of one lifeline connecting a business to its digital prosperity, you implement two.

But diversity means having more than just a reserve parachute to backup the primary parachute in case it fails. The whole point of diversity is to have a distinct alternative that will be unaffected by whatever problems beset the first.

Luminet’s Always On service effectively combines the Luminet Wireless Lite or Pro service with a Fibre service to provide truly diverse last mile internet connectivity. Should there be an issue on the primary connection, failover to the secondary connection automatically kicks in with no loss of uptime. In resilience terms, having distinct fixed wireless and fibre connections is vastly superior to using two connections that share a common medium.

Subject to technical checks, partners can combine a legacy fibre line, or their choice of alternative, with the Wireless Lite/Pro service to enable a 100% Always On SLA. In these cases, customers keen to get up and running quickly need only wait 5–10 days at most to be connected to London’s Network in the Sky and start benefiting from the certainty of 100% uptime.

Find out more about Luminet’s 100% Always-On service.

Contact me to “get connected”.