Planning bandwidth for a potential pandemic

With AH1N1 flu virus circulating and government agencies issuing warnings and guidelines, organizations need to plan ahead in case of an outbreak and prepare their telecom infrastucture to meet an increase in usage of resources for telecommuting.   Schools already issued notices in North America to keep kids at home in case of suspected AH1N1 so did large and public sector organizations for their employees to prevent the virus from spreading.

In this context, the following items will help build a comprehensive strategy to cope with the demand:

• Bandwidth: expect that when you have a significant surge of users, your existing link(s) will be quickly saturated.  Having incremental ISP links will help in this context.  Also, mixing your carrier technologies (Fiber/DS3/T1-E1/DSL/Cable/etc) will also reduce your risk of downtime as points of failure will be removed.  Many organizations invest in SSL VPN gateways but tend to forget that existing bandwidth will not be sufficient and the increase in usage will slow regular services.
• Cost control: adding carriers can prove to be an expensive proposition, but low-cost carriers such as DSL and cable will prove to be a worthwhile option in SMB organizations and keep the project under budget.
• Multisite continuity plans: should you have multiple sites used to redirect remote user traffic, balancing across these sites will be a critical aspect of the strategy.  Geographic link balancing or BGP may be used, but link balancing holds a much quicker response time when ISP failures occur and enable balancing by site saturation.