The Agile approach to networking guarantees 100 per cent uptime

Everything is critical when we are the ones who need it, but deep down we all know that some things are more important than others. This applies to organisations as much as it does individuals, and while few business functions can be downgraded to ‘nice to have’, there are some, and indeed some entire organisations, that really cannot allow for failure.

A 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement (SLA) is all very good, said Sean Nolan, business development manager at Agile Networks, but sometimes that 0.1 per cent really matters.

Agile’s clients include sectors that simply cannot go dark because so many people rely on them, including the public sector, telecommunications and IT service providers.

“Certainly, within the public sector we’d have a lot of clients who need to be able to ensure their networks work. In some areas the loss of networks puts lives at risk – that certainly goes beyond the 99 per cent uptime guaranteed,” he said.

Telecommunications providers, too, need to ensure uptime. After all, some communications are far from frivolous.

“Telcos are in the same boat: there are critical services on these networks,” Nolan said.

For Agile Networks, delivering a connectivity guarantee is central to its business proposition.

“We’re very, very aware of our support and what it means to customers. We all may use fairly nondescript terms like ‘business continuity’, but business continuity in these cases can be keeping people safe, keeping them alive,” said Nolan.

“To a lesser degree, you [also] have the enterprise sector, where things need to keep running.”

On by design

Resilient networks do not just fall from the sky, of course; nor are they lashed together on an ad hoc basic. The key to guaranteeing uptime is network design, Nolan said.

“It’s built in by design, it’s absolutely by design. If it’s not there by design then it’s not going to be there by default or by accident,” he said.

As a result, a design might involve taking four or six core switches and distributing them across different areas.

“For us, network is key. The Agile Networks story is 100 per cent about networks. We don’t do desktop support or printer support. We do routing, switching, wireless and security,” he said.

A recent commission from the Marine Institute demonstrates how this singular focus has seen Agile build a reputation.

“We just got commissioned to do the network fitout for both of the Marine Institute’s research vessels, the MV Tom Crean and the MV Celtic Explorer. We take into consideration the applications that run on that network, and you really don’t want to have to be coming back to shore all the time,” Nolan said.

If you are talking about networks, of course it is impossible to ignore recent history. Yes, periodically there are outages on this or that social media or cloud service, but the actual network backbone has performed even during the toughest of times: an unexpected global pandemic that saw an explosion in digital traffic.

“Our industry has changed in light of Covid, I’d say. There’s not a single person whose working conditions did not change. Rather than come into an office people went to remote working, in some cases overnight and in some cases even in a matter of hours. By and large, the networks performed very well,” he said.

“All our service providers, all our mobile operators and telcos, they all performed. Everyone started relying on broadband networks, 4G networks, 3G networks. I think the industry deserves a bit of a pat on the back. Worst-case scenarios were built into the design and so the networks performed really admirably.”

The upshot of this, Nolan said, is that businesses now know, from top to bottom, that if they can’t communicate, they can’t do anything.

“It has driven the importance of networking to higher levels of business,” he said.