Network resilience is the ability of a network to continue operating and performing optimally after planned and unplanned disruptions. It involves preparing your systems for events such as natural disasters, hardware failures, human errors, scheduled network maintenance and cyberattacks. A resilient network implements strategies that protect networks from the adverse impact of disruption.
Implementing a resilient network ensures business continuity by enabling it to adapt to changes and recover from disruption quickly. Additionally, it allows the system to meet its obligations or strategic objectives related to functionality, performance and availability. A non-resilient network encounters more frequent disruptions and longer downtimes that affect your business's profitability.
What Is the Importance of Network Resiliency?
A resilient network has many benefits for businesses. It ensures the consistent availability of business resources, like data, services and applications. It also builds trust and credibility with clients and other stakeholders by allowing you to continue performing your functions even in challenging times.
Network resilience enables computing infrastructure to adapt to changes or scale to fulfill rapid and unpredicted growth. It enhances security by preventing unauthorized access, cyberthreats, data loss and theft. Additionally, the business continuity assured by a resilient network saves you thousands of dollars caused by productivity loss, reputational damage, opportunity cost and lost revenue during downtime.
How to Achieve Network Resilience?
Achieving a resilient network involves making the networking infrastructure highly resistant to interruptions or capable of performing in a degraded mode in case of attacks, outages or damages. Building a resilient network requires you to focus on working on a few key areas, including the following.
Redundancy
Network redundancy duplicates critical system components, such as power sources, routers, servers and switches. The duplications create diversity and resilience by providing backup when these components fail. They also prevent single points of failure by providing alternative brands, models and types of the components.
It involves duplicating services, systems, paths and applications, making them less susceptible to failures or disruptions. Implementing redundancy may also include setting backup systems, acquiring additional equipment and failover mechanisms. While resilience and redundancy are often confused and wrongly used interchangeably, they are distinctively different.
Here is a closer look at redundancy versus resilience:
- Network redundancy is about having smooth backups when a system component fails, while resilience is about recovering and learning from failures and disruptions
- Implementing redundancy means investing more in hardware and software to create a complex system, whereas resilience involves strategic planning to achieve flexibility and adaptability
- Although resilience depends on redundancy, it also requires additional efforts like fault detection, disaster recovery plans, testing, simulations and training
Fault Tolerance
Fault tolerance is the ability of a network to continue proper operation even when there are hardware and software errors. It relies on strategies like failover mechanisms and load balancing to eliminate single points of failure.
Load balancing makes systems more resilient by distributing them across multiple computing resources. Failover mechanisms involve the smooth and seamless transition to redundant infrastructure.
Achieving fault tolerance aims to ensure graceful performance losses such as throughput and response time. It also directly impacts system availability by minimizing downtime, enabling businesses to work continuously without interruptions.
Network Security
A secure network can protect against potential cyber threats such as ransomware, malware, viruses, data breaches, unauthorized access and hacking attempts. Enhancing network security prepares your network for expected and unexpected threats, reducing their impact on your business continuity and bottom line.
Robust resilience involves the following:
- Continuous network monitoring to enable early detection and prevention of potential attacks
- Network segmentation to minimize the impact of cyberattacks
- Firewall and intrusion detection systems implementation
- Two-factor authentication setup
- Establishing a virtual private network (VPN) in your enterprise network
- Regular cybersecurity training
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery involves making backup and recovery provisions that help your business continue or return to regular operation soon after a disruption. It encompasses planning for disturbances caused by natural disasters, power outages and cyberattacks.
Recovery refers to returning the system to its previous state after a failure or disruption using critical backup data or configurations. Backup involves having duplicate copies of data, applications and configurations stored in secure, offsite locations.
Robust backup and recovery measures make a system resilient by providing efficient and effective recovery methods. Other measures to employ for a more resilient system include:
- Identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities.
- Establishing protocols for quick network restoration.
- Regular testing of the recovery processes.
- Set procedures for rerouting traffic.
- Switching systems and activating standby resources.
Testing and Training
Regular testing is imperative for network resilience. It involves checking for and identifying potential gaps and weaknesses by creating possible scenarios that may cause disruptions. Creating simulations of hardware failures, cyberattacks and natural disasters can help your operation better predict the impact of these types of events on your network.
Tests and simulations help you identify security vulnerabilities and decide how to make improvements efficiently to support performance, prevent downtime and enhance user experience.
In addition to testing, you must train your employees to respond to unexpected events or disasters. Training and drills boost the network's resilience and responsiveness during catastrophic events.
Network Resilience Checklist
A network resilience checklist helps you implement all the best practices that ensure your system is ready for disruptive events. Your checklist needs to include the following items that confirm your network is resilient:
- Install backups for all resources, including applications, services, data, software and hardware
- Implement secondary internet service providers (ISPs) to ensure a consistent internet supply
- Confirm that the system is robust and can handle expected and unexpected disruptions
- Utilize cloud services and redundant data centers for data availability
- Perform regular security assessments and vulnerability scans to identify and find solutions for potential exposures
- Document a disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan
- Define an escalation path that tells employees and other stakeholders how to react in case of network outages and incidents
- Schedule regular training for security best practices and incident response procedures
Enjoy Enhanced Resilience and Diversity With NexGen Network's Global Infrastructure
NexGen Networks is among the fastest-growing telecommunication couriers in the country. We have over two decades of experience providing our services to businesses of all sizes in many industries. We aim to help businesses streamline communication across various sites throughout your network deployment.
We offer flexible and customizable deployment solutions that align with your network infrastructure's requirements and objectives. Our innovative infrastructure keeps your data flowing to prevent lost productivity, revenue and other opportunities.
Are you interested in learning more about how NexGen Networks can support your business? Contact our expert team to discuss how we can make your network more diverse today.
