Internet outages can play havoc on your cloud infrastructure, which is why choosing the right service provider is so important. Registered investment adviser (“RIA”) firms can’t afford to lose access to their network without suffering damage – lost income, loss in productivity, decrease in customer satisfaction, and a severe blow to their professional reputation. That’s why a trusted service provider and robust business continuity plan is so important to keep your firm up and running smoothly.
In the last few years, we’ve witnessed large internet service providers’ “ISP” suffer from widespread network outages, affecting IP, voice, video, and content delivery services. This means websites and online services have gone completely down due to a network outage.
Services like Cloudflare are designed to prevent distributed denial of service attacks, in which massive networks of computers send malicious traffic to websites to take them offline. The services also help keep sites running smoothly when traffic spikes during shopping seasons or when a site hosts a viral video. A large number of customers use Cloudflare for this service and Cloudfare in turn relies on interconnectivity with a variety of other services and ISPs to control their client’s traffic and security.
In this article from Fierce Telecom, ThousandEyes, an internet monitoring and post mortem analysis vendor, was brought in to determine what happened during a widespread outage at CenturyLink. Angelique Medina, Director for Product Marketing for ThousandEyes said, “Many users, services and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) impacted as a result of this outage were not customers or direct peers of CenturyLink, yet found that their traffic was routed through that provider at some point.”
“The deeply interconnected and interdependent nature of the Internet means that no enterprise is an island — every enterprise is a part of the greater Internet whole, and subject to its collective issues,” Medina added. “Understanding your risk factors requires an understanding of who is in your wider circle of dependencies and how their performance and availability could impact your business if something were to go wrong.”
So, when it comes to protecting business continuity for your RIA firm, choosing the right Internet provider is essential. “Take the time to understand your service provider’s interconnected routing pathways to identify any weak points or threats that arise from interdependencies,” said Richard Mabbun, CEO and Managing Partner of ITEGRIA. “An experienced, Qualified Technology Partner will be able to help you to identify and evaluate any risks associated with your ISP as well as make recommendations if a change is needed.”
If you have any questions on choosing the right internet provider or creating a robust business continuity plan for your RIA firm, please contact us. We’re happy to answer any questions you have.