Cellular cyber resilience

How does your business cope when the internet connection goes down? Steve Cassidy explores the mobile option

How to cope if your connection goes down.

Cyber resilience? Is this about hackers and things?

Potentially. Resilience definitely includes being able to cope with hacker attacks, ransomware and so forth. But it also takes in many other threats, such as natural disasters, that might interfere with the normal operation of your business. You can characterise the cyber-resilient mindset as a mixture of “don’t panic” and “stay online” – come what may.

So it basically means having a backup internet connection?

When you put it like that it sounds simple – but the work you’re going to have to do to keep things ticking over in an emergency won’t be so simple, nor is it something you can leave entirely to your technical guys. Schmoozing your local BT Openreach guy is a legitimate part of being cyber resilient, as is rejecting any proposals that rely on a single source of supply.

And the cellular part means specifically switching over to mobile internet when the main connection goes down?

Yes, but again this is more complicated than it sounds, because you need to think about the availability of the network that you’re hoping to switch to: when the internet goes down for all the offices in your area, you might find there’s suddenly a lot less mobile capacity than usual. Obviously it’s very hard to test your provider’s ability to cope with a spike in demand, but you can try running a speed test while a nearby office has a fire drill, and several hundred people are standing around checking their phones while waiting for the all-clear.

What about the cost of moving all of our internet traffic onto a mobile connection?

To an extent this is in your control. Many companies provide phones for their staff on standard contracts agreed with the local reseller, which typically include bandwidth caps. Be wary of restrictive terms that might leave you kicking yourself when disaster strikes.

That said, if your business depends on continuous high-volume data transfer, that’s something worth questioning anyway. Check whether you might be missing a trick in your analysis software, or look into cloud VMs that bring the data closer to the horsepower.

Will a mobile network be fast enough to support our whole office?

It almost certainly won’t be as fast as your regular internet connection – so think now about how you mi ght keep your busi ne ss running te mpor arily over a slow link. Perhaps plan ahead and wo rk out a contingency progra mme of time slots and access priori ties that can be implemented at a mo ment ’s notice. Review your hardwa re too: if you’re keeping an ageing rout er with an old SIM on standb y, you mi gh t be amazed to se e the upli ft yo u ca n get from mo ving to a mo re mo dern connection.

Sh ould we be replacing our routers with wh izzy 5G mo dels ?

Not ne cessar il y. You ma y be able to get by using tethered mobile phones over Bl uetooth, cellular-only base stations – often branded as “MiFi” – or, my particular favourite, the BlackBerry Passport, which presents tethered cellular access over a USB lead, showing up as an Ethernet card on Windows and Macs.

And we can’t just pick up a SIM from the newsagent?

I wouldn’t recommend it as your Plan A. The virtual operators that provide these SIMs mostly tailor their service and pricing towards consumer habits; they’re certainly not going to guarantee any sort of service level on a day when regular internet connections are going down. But by all means include the newsagent SIM as an option: if it lets you send out a holding email to reassure customers that normal service will be resumed shortly, that’s a lot better than nothing.

“When the internet goes down in your area, you might find there’s suddenly a lot less mobile capacity than usual”