Step one: Check to see if it's plugged in...
Sorry, just kidding. If you ever do have a WiFi network failure in your office, it's no laughing matter. An outage can have serious consequence on your bottom line. Business networking isn't a luxury these days, it's a necessity. Chances are, every hour your business goes without a working network will cost you additional money through lost productivity.
Prevention is the best cure for a IT network outage. Having contingency plans in place beforehand is what allows you to have options when the unexpected happens.
Overcoming IT Network Failures
Sometimes you get lucky, and the network failure is happening inside your office. It's far faster to replace a faulty piece of equipment than having to wait for your ISP to send repair workers around!
If you have a working connection through a physical line, then you can at least restore some connectivity. Even if you can't bring most of the network back online, a quick local network can be set up that allows you to reestablish “mission critical” systems.
If your entire wifi system is out due to your PBX or similar system going out, then it boils down to how many assets you have stored off-site, and whether you can access them through any other means. Running triage would be vital in this situation: Finding out what assets are available, and prioritizing access to them based on business need.
Unfortunately, if the system is out, the problem is outside your office, and you haven't prepared backup plans for establishing connections, you're going to quickly find yourself lacking options. Offsite data storage, especially, can mitigate the problems caused by WiFi problems.
Either way, after the connection is restored, it's vitally important to run system checks to ensure nothing was damaged in the outage, depending on what caused it. Servers can be sensitive to sudden changes, and data corruption can occur in these sorts of scenarios. If so, the faster you identify the problem, the less trouble it will cause.
However, if you're honestly concerned about a WiFi network outage hitting your company, the single best thing you could do is:
Investigate New vWLAN Networks
Modern vWLAN distributed networks are nearly impossible to take offline. Instead of relying on centralized servers, these Bluesocket-based access points share the network hosting protocols across the entire network. Any access point knows all the security procedures for the whole network, as well as having access to any shared resources it can connect to.
Even if a key piece of equipment fails, such as your primary local access point, as long as there's a physical connection you can still quickly “patch” the network with one machine bridging it physically, and otherwise connect as normal.
With a distributed network, even a total local outage may not have to bring your work to a screeching halt. Distributed systems could be accessed through other means not reliant on local networks, like through the cell phone system. A smart vWLAN system can be managed from an iPhone, if necessary. Tablets can work on collaborative documents stored on Google, even in a pitch dark office.
In some cases, it may even be possible to rig a connection to another office, and piggyback off their line until yours is restored.
Why suffer a WiFi Network outage when you can vastly reduce your chances of it happening? Think ahead and find the best strategies for preventing outages. 100% uptime may be impossible, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep striving for it!
