PART TWO: YOUR EQUIPMENT IS IN A COLOCATION FACILITY.....NOW WHAT?
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic millions of employees were instructed to work from home, leaving companies struggling to meet the demands of their workers’ network, internet, and IP needs. COVID-19 changed practices in the workplace including logging into company VPNs, video calls, and performing daily tasks all from their home office or kitchen table.
In part one of the series, How DataPoint is Helping in a Covid-19 World, we discussed the important considerations businesses have to take when deciding to move from an office to a fully remote work environment. One such consideration is ensuring that your business’ critical infrastructure and networking gear will be safe, secure, protected, and reliable. One of the best solutions is housing company infrastructure in a colocation facility. Step one complete, now what?
Once a company realizes that they need to embrace remote workers’ needs, they will need to consider the long-term effects of how this will change infrastructure requirements. If a company’s main networking gear stays housed in their office while all their workers are remote, it only takes one disruption such as a power outage, fiber cut or AC failure, to wipe out remote workers’ network access and impact business operations. This could have catastrophic results for a company because it could, for example, prevent being able to process an order or reach out to a prospect, all leading to a loss of revenue.
Remote workers require additional bandwidth and capacity since all work is being performed over the internet. According to The News Stack, video calling increased by over 1,000% in March and VPN usage increased by 49%. The average VPN user will use 10% more bandwidth than a user not using a VPN. When routing all traffic from a VPN user to the company firewall, you may need a minimum of an additional 1-2 Mpbs at the firewall for each employee. IT leaders also need to consider that most workers, while doing their normal work tasks, are also having video conferences with coworkers and customers, scanning Amazon for extra paper towels, or perhaps streaming music. The little things will add up when you are considering tens or hundreds of users. All of this can be very taxing on your network and firewall.
By utilizing DataPoint colocation and network services, company leaders can quickly scale and upgrade their networking and capacity needs to ensure their remote workers are able to perform at full capacity and without interruption. DataPoint can help businesses stay successful by using a fully redundant network that provides scalable solutions for business systems. With connectivity to major carriers and 400 peering points, DataPoint provides secure and reliable access to critical applications and infrastructures. In addition, DataPoint’s IP services provide an easy and cost-effective way to connect to the internet with a scalable range from 10 Mpbs up to 100 Gbps. DataPoint is also able to provide a fully managed firewall solution to ensure that your mission critical applications are safe and available to your employees.
Have confidence in your business, in your remote workers, and in your network connectivity. Datapoint is here to help you. Reach out to us today to ensure that your networking needs fulfill your requirements and lead to success for your company.