Prepared for anything

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. It’s a familiar phrase but an important one, especially in terms of communications - both satellite and terrestrial. Businesses and other organisations must be careful not to prioritise one over the other, but to realise the benefits of each and make them work together so that they can reap the benefits.

Any organisation, anywhere is the world will tell you that access to reliable communications is one of the most important parts of their business. Communications, whether they are voice or data, are critical to any enterprise, or government entity. Once their network has been established, it is also incredibly important that they can back up that network in case of failure. Loss of communications can be devastating for a business as it can mean lost revenue, or, in the case of disaster relief organisations, it can result in lost lives. If a company can consider using a mixture of terrestrial and satellite technology, they can keep their costs down but also have a kind of communications ‘insurance’ that will enable them to continue with communications even though one of the technologies may have failed. Through seamless integration of hybrid networks, extensions of existing enterprise and government network infrastructures can also be established to areas not served by terrestrial carriers.

Backing up your critical communications infrastructure is all part of disaster prevention and recovery. Perhaps unbelievably, many entities do not have this protection, yet in reality, it should be at the top of their list of priorities as a catastrophic network failure could spell devastation. This all must be provided at a reasonable cost, especially in the difficult economic times we find ourselves in. Therefore, the network architecture used must be flexible and embrace different types of transmission media. A failover network must not be centralised so that there is no one single point of failure. It must also be easily integrated with existing terrestrial networks and can share traffic at peak times so that it is utilised instead of going unused until it is required in an emergency situation.

Satellite provides the perfect failover solution for failed terrestrial networks. It is easy to implement and to look after and is also highly reliable in a crisis situation. It is difficult to imagine that a back-up solution is something that is still not considered by many entities even today, where we constantly rely on systems and networks to keep society going. Yes, it will be necessary to outlay a considerable sum of money, but, in the long run, where there may be a serious outage or a catastrophe, is it not more important to ensure continuity of operations? If this is not taken into account, the revenue or lives lost could amount to a lot more than the cost of a back-up satellite network.

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