This document discusses how to create an always-on infrastructure to avoid downtime for cloud-based business systems. It identifies common points of failure like power outages, hardware failures, and human error. It recommends building resiliency by using redundant switches in the local area network, multiple internet connections from different providers for routing, failover capabilities between firewall appliances, and multiple authoritative DNS sources spread across providers. An always-on infrastructure can be achieved by delivering both a reliable primary connection and diverse backup connection with automatic failover between the two.

1. ON
KEEPING
BUSINESS
ALWAYS
HOW TO KEEP YOUR CLOUD UP & RUNNING

2. so much of business
is in the cloudthese days…
you can’t afford for your Internet or hosted voice to ever go down.
So how do you create an
Always On infrastructure?

3. Loss of Power
Building brown-outs or black-outs
can interrupt power to infrastructure
components.
Common Infrastructure
POINTS OF FAILURE

4. Human Error
It happens. People make
mistakes and unplug the wrong
cable in your Telco closet and
BOOM. System down.
Common Infrastructure
POINTS OF FAILURE

5. Hardware Failure
Common Infrastructure
POINTS OF FAILURE
Building brown-outs or black-outs
can interrupt power to infrastructure
components.

6. Where to build in RESILIENCY?

7. Switching Fabric
1
A resilient fabric
has multiple
Ethernet switches
being used.
That way, if one switch
fails/dies, the overall fabric
is still available for use.
[Your Local Area Network (LAN) is comprised
of a system, or “fabric” of Ethernet switches.]

8. Routing
2 Connectivity to third
party should have
multiple upstream
connections from
different providers.
Ideally will have a dynamic
switch to automatically fail
over from primary to
redundant route.
[Routers connect data lines from different
networks.]

9. Firewall
3 Redundancy
provides ability to
failover to
Appliance B when
Appliance A isn’t
working.
Ideally, this failover will be
dynamic (happen
automatically).
[A firewall is an appliance to secure your LAN infrastructure
from the Internet or to separate functions within a
company.]

10. Firewalls are updated often which makes
them susceptible to human error
(which can lead to denial of service)!

11. DNS Service
4 For cloud-based
systems, you don’t
want a single DNS
authoritative source,
you want 2-3 spread
across 2-3
providers.
When you configure a host to use
DNS, add multiple DNS resolvers
to eliminate a single point of
failure.
[DNS translates the name-based website URLs into
logical numerical-based addresses to identify actual
servers.]

12. DNS can fail when the host fails
due to Denial of Service attacks!

13. Delivering a
reliable primary
connection AND a
truly diverse
backup
connection.
Taking care of
dynamic failover
between them.
Rather than the headache of sourcing
multiple vendors, Allied can take care of
RESILIENCY on your behalf by:

14. sales@alliedtelecom.net
202.349.0406
Reach out to an
Allied professional today!
www.alliedtelecom.net