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Enhance networking capabilities and increase resilience with mobile broadband
March 2022 by Sundeep Rajput, Product Manager (Mobility) at Expereo
Fast, unfettered and reliable internet connectivity is no longer a convenience for businesses, it’s an absolute necessity. The business landscape has changed in profound ways in the past couple of years, but one of the most pervasive and far-reaching changes has been the sudden pivot to cloud-based working. Even businesses that had already reached a level of maturity on their cloud transformation journey found themselves accelerating their plans dramatically as the need for speed, agility and access ramped up quicker than anybody could have foreseen. The result? Businesses are now completely dependent on the internet for virtually all of their daily operations, from accessing cloud-based applications and finding data records, to dealing with customers and processing transactions.
In turn, that means businesses are very much at the mercy of the quality and reliability of their internet connection. Any sluggishness or downtime can have devastating consequences, costing businesses money and severely hampering their productivity. According to Gartner, the average cost of downtime to a business is roughly $5,600 per minute. What’s more concerning is that as the push to cloud-based working continues, exacerbated by the pandemic and the increased need for flexibility, the pressure is mounting on fixed networks to carry more traffic without compromising performance. Internet outages will “continue to get worse before they get better,” which is one of the reasons businesses are taking greater control of their connectivity with SD-WAN or SASE solutions.
Streamlining and optimizing traffic is all good and well, but what happens when there’s a network outage that’s beyond a company’s sphere of control? That’s where cellular comes in, and there’s a reason it’s booming in popularity. Incorporating mobile broadband into an overall connectivity solution will allow businesses to mitigate any temporary networking challenges by leaning on cellular as and when needed, giving users a seamless, unbroken connection that will never let them down.
Here are just three key reasons why businesses of all shapes and sizes should be looking to incorporate mobile broadband into their tech stack.
Maintain application availability and even increase performance
If mobile connectivity is used as a network underlay, it not only maintains access to applications during critical outages or periods of network degradation, it also has the potential to increase application performance for users. So instead of seeing a dip in performance during service interruptions, users might actually see a small performance boost as they go about their daily tasks blissfully unaware of the service degradation on their usual fixed network. In this way, businesses can actually turn what would usually be a negative into an overwhelming positive.
Optimized connectivity across an entire organization
When paired with an SD-WAN solution, as mentioned above, mobile broadband can actively improve connections and speeds across an organization’s entire network infrastructure. SD-WAN can manage multiple high-bandwidth WAN links, including mobile broadband, while simultaneously using artificial intelligence to control traffic flows from one location to another via the highest performing link. That means no matter where employees are - whether they’re working at different ends of a large office campus, across regional or national borders in different branches entirely, or logging in from their home office - they will always have a steady, streamlined and optimized connection to work-based applications. If a network degrades for any reason or the service is limited, SD-WAN will intelligently utilize cellular broadband to ‘plug the connectivity gaps’ in the most efficient way possible.
Reserve high-quality traffic for high business priorities
By incorporating mobile broadband into its tech stack, a business can ensure the deployment of high-quality traffic to the very core of its business. In other words, a mobile connection together with SD-WAN can be used to provide low-performing traffic links to low-priority channels that don’t directly support revenue-generating business. Likewise, a company can ensure that the ‘primary connection’ with the fastest speeds is reserved for more important critical business functions, such as customer channels, transactions, or the ability to access important files.
Today’s businesses aren’t just on a digital transformation journey. They’re on a connectivity journey. By securing unbroken, high-quality connectivity for their customers and staff, companies are futureproofing themselves in preparation for an era of business and commerce in which everything will hang on the quality and reliability of an internet connection. That’s why the adoption of mobile as part of the connectivity mix is happening at a faster rate than ever before, fuelled the increasing convergence between cellular and fixed-line broadband. Like so much else in business these days, connectivity isn’t a ‘one stop’ issue with an out-of-the-box solution, it’s a nuanced challenge that requires a nuanced approach. For all these reasons, 2022 will be the year of mobile broadband for so many businesses.
