Companies today have had their share of experiences with storms and outages. How much these outages affect the business is a matter of preparedness in advance.
At the recent ITEXPO (News - Alert) West event held in Las Vegas, TMC Senior Editor Peter Bernstein took a moment to sit down with Encore Networks’ (News - Alert) sales director Greg Holt. Virginia-based Encore is a provider of machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions for fixed and wireless communications. The company produces cellular broadband routers for the commercial and industrial marketplace. The company manufactures its own hardware – a rarity today – and attended ITEXPO to launch a new product called the EN-2000 to address the need for business continuity.
“We chose ITEXPO to be the venue to launch this product,” said Holt. “It’s going to be the very first sub-$300 IPsec, VPN broadband router for the business continuity failover backup marketplace. We see this fitting in among the small to medium-sized enterprises that are primarily getting their wide area network services from a cable provider like a Time Warner (News - Alert) or Comcast.”
Holt told Bernstein companies need to ask themselves what happens when they experience a loss of signal. What happens to your business? It’s a critical question to ask.
“This device enables them to actually have a backup plan for disaster recovery: a fallback position,” he said. “What the EN-2000 will do is, in the advent of LOS or loss of signal of the enterprise’s wide area network services, it will failover to Verizon 4G LTE (News - Alert) service. That becomes your de fact wide area network service for both data and voice over IP for the enterprise. When there’s reacquisition of signal from your primary WAN provider, then it goes back to that primary WAN and the EN-2000 goes into a kind of ‘wait mode,’ waiting for that event to happen again.”
Holt noted that the EN-2000 is a full enterprise-class router: it will do IP pass-through, it’s got a firewall, and it supports up to five GRE tunnels for encapsulation and offers encryption for Internet protocol security, or IPsec.
“This could work as your enterprise router until your primary enterprise router is restored,” he said.
Holt told Bernstein the ideal customers for the solution are small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that need a WAN failover backup solution, but are “technically challenged.” What this means is they may not have IT staff employed, but subcontract this work out and often don’t have anyone “on the spot” to solve problems.
“It has to be simple and easy to deploy and manage,” noted Holt. “And this device allows them to do that.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle
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