Enhancing Network Resilience: A Comprehensive Guide for B2B Decision Makers
Network resilience gets budgeted for after the first outage that costs real money. The usual answer is a second line from a second provider, which helps only if something actually uses both.
Speedify is software that combines those lines so they carry traffic together and either one can fail without taking the site offline. With only one line, Speedify works as an encrypted VPN and cannot stop that line from dropping.
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How Speedify combines internet connections on any hardware
Get started with Speedify for your business
Speedify offers three commercial paths. They work together, and most enterprise customers use two or more.
01
Speedify Teams
Speedify on every supported OS for every team member
Centralized dashboard for billing, user provisioning, and usage analytics
CSV import/export and a RESTful management API
02
Speedify for Routers
License for supported OpenWrt routers
Powered by Speedify hardware lineup ready to deploy out of the box
Miri, GL.iNet and other partner models
Covers every device on the network, with no per-device install
03
Embed Speedify into your product
A · DIY
Build it yourself with the Speedify SDK.
Integrate Speedify into your iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux or QNX product. Full developer documentation, sample code and supported integration paths. Your team owns the build, and the Speedify SDK handles combining the internet connections.
B · CUSTOM ENGINEERING
Have the Speedify team build it for you.
With Speedify, your internet stays on when one connection fails.
This guide covers what resilience and redundancy mean in practice, the common approaches, and how combining connections in software compares.
Network Resilience: Being Prepared for the Unforeseen
Network resilience refers to a network’s ability to withstand disruptions, adapt to changes, and recover quickly from failures. It’s the practice of preparing for an unpredictable future in ways that safeguard a network from impact.
A resilient network is able to quickly bounce back from any attacks, outages or other network events. It’s like having a robust safety net that ensures uninterrupted communication, data transfer, and business operations. Resilient networks are essential for maintaining productivity, preventing downtime, and safeguarding against cyber threats.
Redundancy: the Backbone of Network Resilience
Network redundancy is a key component involved in network resilience. It allows you to use your network if something happens to the network infrastructure or even to external parties, such as ISPs.
Redundancy refers to multiple strategies, such as extra network hardware for failures, overprovisioning with additional bandwidth, decentralized distribution of business-critical applications over multiple data centers, etc. These all can reduce the impact of failures. But the most important aspect of redundancy when it comes to network resilience is being able to access the Internet.
Channel Bonding, also known as link aggregation, is a technique that combines multiple network connections (such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular) in parallel, into a single, high-bandwidth link. If one connection fails, traffic shifts to the remaining active connections. It’s like merging several lanes into a superhighway.
The main purpose of channel bonding is to provide connection redundancy, thus, helping with network resilience.
Popular Solutions for Network Resilience Redundancy
These are five widely used solutions for enhancing network resilience in the B2B space and even in homes recently, especially if the Internet is used for activities such as live streaming, playing games online or even working remotely:
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Load balancers distribute traffic across multiple servers or Internet connections, ensuring optimal resource utilization. Load balancers automatically reroute traffic if a server or connection becomes unavailable. One of the downsides of load balancing is that activities using only a single network socket to connect to the Internet will not be optimized through load balancing. For instance, video streaming, VPN connections, and large file transfers are not sped up by a load balancer.
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SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) dynamically manages traffic across different network paths, including satellite, broadband, and cellular. It adapts to changing conditions, optimizing performance and reliability. This results in addressing Internet connectivity issues such as network congestion, jitter, packet loss and service outages. It gives businesses a competitive edge by increasing bandwidth and network reliability.
- Network failover solutions are failover mechanisms that automatically switch to a second connection when the primary link fails. Examples include dual WAN routers and cellular failover devices. Generally, cellular-based network failovers are the most popular, as they can be deployed anywhere there’s a cell signal available. Banks and retailers use the same approach to keep ATMs and kiosks online.
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Cloud-based resilience refers to leveraging cloud services, such as Amazon AWS, to ensure that a cloud-based system or application recovers quickly and effectively from disruptions, such as hardware failures, network outages, cyberattacks, etc. Cloud resiliency includes a set of strategies, technologies and best practices designed to minimize downtime, ensure data integrity and maintain uninterrupted service delivery in the cloud environment.
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Hybrid networks combine wired and wireless connections for flexibility and redundancy. For instance, using both fiber-optic lines and 4G LTE ensures connectivity even if one medium fails. Typical deployment scenarios for hybrid access networks include hybrid routers and aggregation gateways with load balancing functionality.
Speedify: Boosting Network Resilience
Speedify is a set of networking tools built to improve the speed, stability and security of your Internet. Speedify’s technology for combining internet connections spreads individual packets across all of your available internet connections, so even large single-socket transfers such as streaming video, uploading, or downloading files get faster.
Speedify’s protocol can open up multiple sockets over each connection. If there’s packet loss on one of the TCP sockets, only the network packets being sent over that socket are delayed, as the TCP protocol will keep trying to send those, while the other sockets can continue sending other packets. This will minimize the negative effects of high latency and packet loss on connection performance, including the cases when you use Speedify with a single Internet connection.
As opposed to the limited “backup flow” ability of MPTCP, Speedify has a more complex approach to the whole thing, with advanced logic and multiple types of connection priorities. Meaning that it will use the connections being bonded according to the performance and priorities set by the user. Speedify will send as much data as it can on:
- non-metered connections, such as wired Ethernet and Wi-Fi, before sending a lot of data through cellular
- lower latency connections, such as wired (cable, DSL), before wireless (cellular, satellite)
- higher bandwidth connections before slower ones.
Reasons to Get Speedify on Your Radar for Network Resilience
Speedify is built for all devices and available anywhere you need better Internet. The core features for network resilience include:
- failover and gapless handoff: when one connection drops, Speedify moves traffic to your other working connection(s) in milliseconds, according to Speedify.
- enhanced streaming and QoS: Speedify automatically prioritizes streams over other network traffic to help avoid stuttering, buffering and disconnects during important video calls or livestreams.
- connection priorities and limits: with Speedify you can automatically manage your connections or manually set priority levels to fine tune how and when they should be used. You can even set data and rate limits to prevent overages on costly metered connections.
- strong encryption: under the hood Speedify operates like a VPN, which means all traffic is encapsulated and passed through a secure VPN tunnel using DTLS 1.2 and AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305.
Enterprise solutions include Speedify Teams (Speedify’s features plus team-oriented management designed with organizations in mind), the Speedify SDK (a toolkit that can be built into existing software to improve or customize network behavior), and Powered by Speedify embedded solutions for the next generation of routers, networking appliances and smart devices.
Speedify Users for Better Network Resilience
There are many categories of users who can benefit from the improved network resilience offered by Speedify. Target verticals include:
- first responders: mission critical crews like firefighters, emergency medical services and rescue services need the best internet connection they can get in the various scenarios they might be faced with. Whether in a remote area or on top of a mountain, fast and stable connectivity is paramount.
- live streamers and broadcasters: whether it’s online influencers, educational services, religious services, or media production companies, everybody needs to avoid dropouts and even that low quality video that you get when your internet connection starts acting up.
- enterprises and even SMBs, for remote work purposes, where you also need an extra layer of security. Important internal calls and client facing ones should not suffer because one of the people on the call has a poor internet connection.
Most organizations can benefit from better network resilience with Speedify, and the Speedify team can build a custom solution where a standard plan does not fit.
Speedify Business Solutions
Speedify Teams
Speedify for Routers
Speedify Embedded Solutions and Integrations
Add Speedify to your own app or hardware with the Speedify SDK. Your product then combines internet connections, fails over automatically when one drops, and encrypts the traffic, using the same technology as the Speedify app.