Computer Repair Wichita – Redundancy…It’s for ‘Out of the Ordinary’

For more information about computer repair and support in Wichita KS, visit our homepage at Proper Technology Solutions.

What is Redundancy?

We all know the meaning of the word.  What does it mean in regards to IT services?  Good question.  An even better question would be ‘when do we need it?’

Let’s answer the first question right off the bat.  Redundancy in IT is just what you might think it is.  Having something that is the same as something else.  I have to keep my laptop with me at all times.  It has really important information that I need to access all the time and I would be lost without it.  I could buy a ‘redundant’ matching laptop and sync the two every night.  That way if someone stole my laptop, I could just run home and grab the spare.

This is where the second question comes in.  Is that really practical?  I have a solid backup of the files on my laptop, so I could easily recover, it might just take a few hours.

Where redundancy really comes in handy is when a few hours is too long or for ‘out of the ordinary’ events.

Case Study:

One of our customers, a medical office with about 30 computers recently planned to migrate from their existing server-based electronic medical records (EMR) software to a system hosted entirely in the cloud.  We discussed their Internet service and found that it had been very reliable over the past few years.  It would have to be, because their ability to check patient records, charts and billing would only be available if the Internet was live.

I asked the office manager what the longest ‘tolerable’ outage would be and found that a couple of hours would be the limit.  We discussed the ‘out of the ordinary’ next.  Normally, an Internet outage might last less than an hour.  Unfortunately, the world isn’t always ‘normal’.  Construction crews might damage a fiber line, a severe storm might wreak havoc, or a misconfiguration somewhere down the line could cause a major, lengthy outage.

We decided to pick up a ‘redundant’ Internet provider.  In their case, Cox Business.  Unlike the laptop scenario, we can limit the waste in idle equipment.  With the right router in place, the customer will be running both Cox and their existing ISP in a load-balanced system, utilizing both networks, but able to still function without one or the other.

…But make sure provider ‘A’ isn’t leasing their lines to provider ‘B’ (but that’s another article)

If you are looking for expert computer repair and network support in Wichita and surrounding communities, please give us a call at (316) 337-5628.  We can discuss your needs and even schedule an onsite evaluation of your network to see where we can make you more efficient and secure, all while keeping your costs in mind.

 

 

Business, Cloud Computing, IT Support, online backup

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