This week, a major outage on the BT network caused broadband service problems in the Wolverhampton area.  This affected a few of our clients, leaving them without their regular Internet connection for several hours on Monday morning and a couple more hours on Tuesday morning.

Because ADSL broadband services are relatively low-cost, BT do not provide service level agreements for these type of connections, which can leave small businesses in a tight spot if they run into problems.  BT do provide an ‘enhanced care’ option, at extra cost, but even this only provides a guarantee that service will be resumed within 20 working hours.  In the event that this target is not met, 50% of the monthly service fee is refunded, which isn’t much consolation.

So, what steps can you take to help you cope with a broadband outage in your business?

First of all, you can make provisions for a back-up Internet connection.  This could be a cheap low-cost broadband service with a different provider to your main connection, or, if your router supports it, a 3G USB dongle can provide a decent alternative.  This will give you outbound Internet access, but inbound services such as SMTP email delivery will still be unavailable.

To enable access to email during an outage, we can provide an online back-up mailbox that will allow access via web browser, enabling you to send and receive email as normal.  For convenience, you will also be able to access all email sent or received during the past 30 days.

A further option is to replace ADSL completely, with a leased-line Internet connection from BT.  Whilst this will provide dedicated bandwidth and improved service levels, the cost is usually prohibitive for small businesses.

To summarise, for the majority of small businesses, the most cost-effective solution is a 3G USB dongle to provide basic Internet access, and back-up mailboxes to provide access to email for key users.

For many business owners it can be difficult to see at-a-glance what’s going on within their organisation.  Databases store lots of information but getting access to it quickly can sometimes be a totally different story.

We recently discovered PowerGadgets and, although the product is designed for IT Professionals, it can be used by any business to bring real-time business data to the desktops of owners and managers.

For example, at JamesCash.co.uk we use a database to track all of the IT support work we are doing for our clients.  We use PowerGadgets to display the current number of open tickets we have (green) and the number of unassigned tickets (red) waiting to be allocated.

This allows service managers to quickly spot new work without having to constantly check another application, assign it to an engineer without delay and improve the speed of our service.

With support for SQL and ODBC, a wide number of chart options including bar charts, line charts, pie charts and many more, the scope for use of PowerGadgets is massive.  At JamesCash.co.uk we have around a dozen or so of these gadgets displaying vital business information and enabling us to react quickly to the needs of our clients.

Further information can be found by following this link:
http://www.softwarefx.com/sfxSqlProducts/powerGadgets/

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