– Rick Stevenson, CEO, Opengear, says:
For all organizations, ensuring uptime and system availability are key benchmarks for the IT department. However, considering the numerous issues that system administrators face in a given day or week, guaranteeing optimal infrastructure functionality is far from an easy task. By adopting cellular out-of-band management solutions, organizations can expect to realize these three core benefits:
1) Avoid and mitigate the top causes of network downtime
According to this infographic, while a wide variety of issues can lead to downtime, by far the most common problem network engineers face is hardware failure. Luckily, this issue in particular can be easily mitigated with out-of-band management tools. Other top causes of network downtime, human error and software failure, also see their potential harm, frustration and costs minimized by remote access. By providing always-on management control and access, IT admins can oversee endpoints at all times, enabling a far more streamlined process for discovering and troubleshooting problems – and helping to ensure that issues are resolved as swiftly as possible.
2) Reduce expensive outages with more resilient systems
Every organization knows that downtime is costly and leads to lost productivity, but very few know just how problematic outages really are. As the infographic illustrates, 1.2 billion work-hours are lost annually due to downtime because of how long an incident can last, how long it takes to recover from said incidents and how common downtime is today. Fortunately, all of these costs and wasted efforts can be easily mitigated with a simple investment in out-of-band management, as these tools help to reduce the length of outages and provide the oversight IT admins need to reduce their occurrence.
3) Faster and more cost-effective than legacy out-of-band connections
When it comes to out-of-band management, organizations historically have opted for add-on modems to facilitate these efforts. But, with the development and rise of cellular out-of-band management solutions, modems are no longer an ideal option in the vast majority of instances because they are slower, more expensive and less robust than cellular OOB. Not only is 4G LTE up to 10 times faster than a 56K modem, switching out a phone line for a data plan for OOB can help organizations reduce their monthly phone bills by up to 90 percent as well. Plus, cellular wireless networks ensure that IT admins can oversee infrastructure even when core connectivity is down.
As the costs related to downtime and to legacy out-of-band management rise, cellular OOB tools will increasingly become the best option available for companies in any industry. By being able to use cellular connections for oversight, organizations will have a far easier time guaranteeing uptime in all instances, all while reducing the stress placed on the IT department. At the end of the day, obtaining a cellular out-of-band management solution may be the best investment an organization makes.
Rick Stevenson is CEO of Opengear, a company that builds remote infrastructure management solutions for enterprises.
