Network Resilience Starts With Opengear Smart Out-of-Band
The way that most enterprises do business has drastically changed in the past few months. However, one aspect for success that has remained constant is the need for continuous uptime. In fact, Network Resilience has never been more important. This concept begins with the idea that every organisation needs secure, always on remote access to their critical devices.
IoT initiatives, the rise of connectivity and the ongoing migration to the cloud has caused every industry to become more virtualised. Add in the increase of employees working from home and the difficulty of traveling to remote locations, and the network becomes more dispersed and more challenging to manage. These all create more vulnerabilities which can increase the likelihood of an outage. Opengear, the leader in Network Resilience, conducted an independent research study of 500 senior IT decision makers. In it, more than half stated that they had four outages in a year. It also stated, that nearly one third, had lost more than $1 million in the past year due to network outages – a cost that most enterprises can’t afford.
What are some outage causes? Human error, cyber-attacks and environmental conditions are a few factors. However, one of the most common causes is the vulnerability of the primary network’s last mile. All of the network traffic for an office, branch or remote site are funneled through single links. The amount of data that can be transmitted to an enterprises’ ISP is based on the links’ bandwidth. This bottle neck can lead to network congestion, leaving an organisation exposed to cyber-attacks and human error which can lead to an outage, causing downtime.
Any amount of downtime can have a significant impact on customer experience, revenue and business operations. To avoid this, many enterprises choose to use an Out-of-Band management solution.
In-Band and Out-of-Band
Before we get into why an organisation would want to use Out-of-Band, let’s talk about network management overall. There are two primary ways to manage a network, In-Band and Out-of-Band.
In-Band Management is when devices are managed through protocols like a telnet or SSH connection to a router or by using some kind of SNMP based tools. Data, production and management traffic use the same path for communicating various elements, so for most enterprises this approach isn’t enough. When an outage does occur and you don’t have an alternative path to the primary network, you’ll get locked out of the management plane. This increases security vulnerabilities and makes sure that none of your devices can be reached.
Out-of-Band management with Opengear is very simple. It gives you another way to securely connect to remote equipment when an outage occurs. Acting as an alternative or secondary access path, when paired with Failover to Cellular, enterprises have enough bandwidth to identify the issue and remediate it – all without interrupting normal business operations or having to step on-site. This means no truck rolls, no late runs to a remote site. This has always been a need for organisations of all types. However, as deployments for distributed, remote sites increase and with current travel restrictions, Out-of-Band is a necessity for network engineers.
The Network Resilience Platform
Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform provides always on, secure access for Day One provisioning, every day device management and when the primary network goes down. The platform includes Smart OOBTM Console Servers, and NetOps Console Servers which are centrally orchestrated through Lighthouse Management Software. Placing a console server at every location creates an independent management plane where engineers can access the network at all times. Using standard NetOps tools such as Docker containers and a Python runtime environment, these appliances can also be used to automate repetitive processes and add a layer of intelligence to the network.
Organisations Who Use Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform
Who can use Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform? Anyone can. Right now, over 75% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Opengear – as well as thousands of global Public & Private Sector organisations.
What challenges can be solved by deploying an Opengear Smart Out-of-Band solution?
- Ensure Remote connectivity
- Reduce systems outages
- Cyber-security attacks
- Address disaster recovery
- Reduce downtime
- Provision new or reconfigure existing sites
- Enable Secure remote access
- Complete network refreshes
- Ensure Business continuity
- Meet Service Level Agreements
- Overcome Site access/travel bans
- Reduce Response times – mean time to repair
- Meet security & compliance requirements
- Add to SD-WAN deployments
- Manage more IT with less resources
- Remediate Network & IT team staffing shortages
Out-of-Band is the network for network engineers. When an outage occurs, it’ll keep you and your enterprise running. Opengear’s solutions are here for your Day One Provisioning needs, every day management and when the network goes down.
So the question is, how can Opengear help you and your network needs?
To learn more about Opengear products, contact us today.