Firstly, it’s important to define what we mean when we talk about resilience. We believe the term resilience is the ability to adapt and cope with stress and adversity.

Resilience refers to the ability of a system to bounce back from disruptions or disturbances. This is often conflated with robustness, but robustness refers to the ability of a system to withstand disturbances or shocks. In other words, resilience is the ability to recover from a disturbance, while robustness is the ability to resist being affected by a disturbance in the first place.
When it comes to assessing connectivity infrastructure, the two are intrinsically linked, but resilience shifts the focus to a pragmatic solution around risk types and likelihood, rather than trying to strengthen the ecosystem – which can often mean disproportionate overspeccing and investment to avoid impact.

Both are incredibly important and intrinsically linked, however, we’ll focus on the resilience aspect here.

In connectivity, resilience refers to the ability of a network or system to maintain reliable and stable connections in the face of disruptions or failures.

Having a resilient connectivity system is important for many organisations, as it can help ensure that essential communication and data transmission can continue even when faced with unexpected challenges. This can help businesses and projects maintain their reliable and stable operations and prevent costly delays or disruptions.

To know how to build a resilient network, you first have to assess the risks and threats. These risks can include outages, interference, or physical damage to network infrastructure.

Whereas each one of these risks is distinctly different, assessing the likelihood of the risk and the potential impact of each occurrence is a great first step. On a construction site in the UK, physical damage to a connection is more likely than a natural disaster, but an outage is most likely so prioritising the resilience strategy against the risk profile is important.

To fight against connectivity disruption, it is important to have a plan in place before the outage occurs. This plan should include the following steps:

As we’ve said above, it is also important to be aware of the potential causes of connectivity outages such as natural disasters, power failures, and equipment failures, and to take steps to minimise the risk of these events. This could be as simple and cost-effective as having spare equipment on site, pre-configured and ready to roll automatically in case of an emergency.

Alongside the risk profile analysis, there are a number of specific ways to improve connectivity resilience, including implementing redundant systems and infrastructure, using backup power sources, and implementing network monitoring and management tools.

No one can predict the future, but with careful planning, monitoring and management, you can create the best conditions for undisturbed operational efficiency.

A redundant connectivity system is a system that is designed to continue functioning even if one or more of its components fail or lose connectivity.

This is achieved by having multiple paths for data or power to flow through the system so that if one path is unavailable, another can be used instead. This type of redundancy is often used in critical systems, such as those in transportation, healthcare, and telecommunications, to ensure that the system remains operational even in the event of failure.

We’re big fans of the phrases “if you can measure it you can manage it” and “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

Visibility is key when it comes to building stable, reliable and resilient connectivity networks. There is a multitude of benefits to a managed network or using fully managed services for your connectivity, all of which feed into making your solution more resilient.

By identifying and resolving issues quickly, network monitoring and management can reduce the need for expensive downtime and repairs. Infrastructure projects in the modern day are increasingly reliant on connectivity and the cost and time impact of even a short duration loss of connectivity can be significant.

In summary, network monitoring and management is an essential part of your connectivity resilience checklist, mainly as it helps you identify and get ahead of the problems before or as they occur. This continuous improvement approach then compounds as you begin to identify, plan execute and review over time, developing your resilience in the right direction.

These tools also have the benefit of providing the required information to keep compliance with regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS and SOC2. In addition, many network monitoring and management tools include automation features that can help to reduce the workload of network administrators, and also reduce human error.

This enhances resilience by taking out the potential unpredictability of human error or absence and ticks the boxes for compliance too – which could cause issues down the line if your systems are audited and shut down for noncompliance, causing costly delays, disruptions and knee-jerk investment to meet the standards

In summary, we believe that creating a resilient system relies as much on foresight and insight as it does on strengthening the overall connectivity infrastructure to a point that can generate over-confidence. By assessing risks, preparing critical infrastructure based on multiple scenario modelling and building in monitoring and management systems (or using managed services) you’ll be in a better place to adapt and cope with disruption. We can’t promise that someone won’t cut through a major comms line, but by taking the steps above you can minimise the operational, productivity and therefore commercial impact of the event.

Onwave works across many sectors that rely on mission-critical communications and crucial connectivity networks, providing robust and resilient solutions wrapped with expert engineering and managed services to make sure you’re never disconnected. Get in touch today and let us help you achieve your goals.

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