As the world grows in terms of connectivity, we seem to display an overwhelming reliance on technology. Among other things, the internet has grown at a stellar rate in the last few years and it keeps getting bigger and better by the day. The future holds many possibilities that have never seemed possible before but all of them rely on the network being up and running all the time.
An interesting topic of debate for the last few years has been how the world would function without data consumption power. In layman’s terms, how would the world pull through during times of a power outage? When the networks go down, there will clearly be a lot that is lost but just how much would that be? Let’s find out
Internet is Money
Recent comprehensive studies and articles have shown us that the internet is a strong creation that is important to almost all enterprises. Without data, the world would be at a huge stagger. In fact, without data, the world would be unable to function for much longer than even a few hours. Many studies conducted seek to understand just how much organizations rely on data connectivity and the results showed that many companies had faced short thirty-term outages in the recent past year or so. Each time, such an outage proved to be very costly for the organization, costing them, on an average north of a hundred thousand dollars each time.
A lot of outages are caused by uncertain factors and may take longer than required to be resolved. For example, about 35% of the reported network outages faced by companies were not easy to resolve and took more than a day. This amount of time lost for a big organization can make the difference between a high and a low.
Organizations depend entirely on their internet infrastructure to operate. These operations have slowly been digitizing themselves as time has passed. While it is always good to have an offline backup of things, working on projects back in an offline manner is a much more difficult task however when there is an internet connection power outage.
Pandemic Escalation
The last year has been governed by a major pandemic that has taken its toll on people throughout the world. Companies meanwhile have learned to operate from home and many employees now see digitization as a feasible option for the future. The only drawback here is that when there is a downtime problem, work can come entirely to a standstill.
A simple glitch in CMS software could create large-scale inaccessibility for companies around the world. Even the smallest things have been dealt with online over time. Word documents today are secondary to online documents that can be shared and edited by a number of people online. Services have grown comprehensive but are also reliant on the internet.
There have been various network outages over the last year and a staggering 31% of the companies that were hit by them, lost money in excess of a million dollars.
Various teams have been trying to come up with a cost-effective solution for such a problem that could occur in the future. Causing an outage like this is actually quite easy. A wrong wire being cut, or an engineer’s mistake can see an entire grid going down in no time at all. The bigger challenge is to be ready for this and have a ready solution for when this happens. Without a certain plan in action for these times, there can be dangerous consequences.
Network resilience
An interesting topic floating around to combat the problems faced with network outages is that of network resiliency. While this term seems simple enough, there is a lot that it encompasses and plans to achieve.
More than 23% of the network outage recipients from last year reported an instrumental rise in the number of times that such an incident has taken place. As the world scales up in terms of data consumption, it has become clear that keeping up with the ever-present demand has been a challenge. Due to frequent outages, there are organizations that are always susceptible to losses.
Network resiliency can combat such problems by providing quick and easy solutions to network outages. While the main goal will always be to be able to control the grid at all times without any unplanned cuts, it is always best to prepare for dealing with such situations too. Network resilience aims to be able to take care of any and all problems that can be a part of the network outage that affects many periodically. This then lets you restore things back to normal in no time at all, minimizing your losses.
Network Outages Costing A Lot
As we move forward into a world of smoother data scalability and seamless possibilities, many things will be dependent upon the internet in the near future. The IoT project plans to digitize almost every single aspect of our lives by simply making everything run digitally. 5G technology and smart WiFis will soon make it possible to access unreal internet speeds for unreal things. Smart cities will be powered by this technology and in those cities various vital industries too. Industries like healthcare, financial services, banking, and other places could soon rely on the internet for everything. In the near future, even a short-term network collapse could cost us a lot more than it does today. In fact, without proper planning, it will most certainly be perilous going into such a future.
Conclusion
The spectrum burst is still in its infancy and without proper care, we can easily forget to lay down the right foundation for it. With network outages still prevalent and a normal part of many lives, it will be problematic to juxtapose such a reality in the near future. Today, every single network outage, on average, costs about 8,000$/ day. That is a huge price when considering the number of network outages faced daily. Features like network resilience and higher security latency can soon help us with this but only time will tell how efficient these measures are.
