Sharing is becoming a bigger part of our lives. Whether it’s in leveraging services such as shared rides or cars, sharing our work through digital collaboration tools or knowledge sharing on platforms such a Wikipedia. This has brought greater efficiencies, faster dissemination of information and even opened new business opportunities.

However, sharing your network? That’s something that will cause major disruptions, especially as remote working and segregated teams continue to play an important role in our day to day lives.

Shared networks hurt productivity

We have long known that network connectivity is the lifeblood of organisations. If the network is down, the entire business comes to a halt. So many IT managers cater for redundancy lines and multiple carriers to minimise the chances of such a situation.

However, most incumbent providers leverage on shared fibre routes which means businesses will still lack physical diversity for their connectivity. To ensure your business is truly resilient, it is important to complement your infrastructure plan with a provider that can deliver unique and alternative fibre routes.

This calls for a need for diversity in infrastructure, to spread your risk and move away from “putting all your eggs in one basket”. A recent Internet outage on June 8 occurred because cloud computing company, Fastly, was hit by technical issues. This left many major websites inaccessible and highlights the importance of having alternative solutions in place to mitigate your business risk should the unexpected happen.”

The rise of the home office

The issue of resiliency should not end at our usual concept of the workspace. With work from home becoming the new normal, it is time businesses start to look at home offices as “branch offices” where critical job functions need to continue, rain or shine.

However, most home users subscribe to a single network provider and this has caused outages on home networks to cause major disruptions to the workday. A major telco was hit with a 12hr outage impacting WFH users, with issues starting from 5am. This isn’t the first case, multiple reports of outages, from as early as the start of circuit breaker and into the later part of 2020 has caused connectivity issues to become a common gripe for WFH users since 2020.

Business leaders need to start thinking seriously about equipping employees to work from home effectively. The work from home consideration should extend to helping IT managers oversee and troubleshoot for home networks remotely, check network performance and implement or push down security policies. Learn more about work from home solutions here.

At SPTel, you don’t need to share

To increase the diversity and resilience of the infrastructure supporting businesses in Singapore as well as to future proof the country for a smart nation future, it is critical that we have an alternative infrastructure provider that can act as a resilient option to the current incumbents.

SPTel, an ST Engineering and SP Group JV, is well poised to fulfil this gap in the market. At SPTel, we cater specifically to business users, allowing us to size up and design our network to deliver up to stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for corporate users to minimise incidents caused by overloading of equipment capacity.

Customers will benefit from SPTel’s unique fibre pathways, which have a physically separate network core from other providers. Each building that SPTel connects with their fibre network is also supported by dual exchanges for seamless auto-failover should there be a disruption.

To deliver greater reliability for our services, SPTel is investing in smart facilities to safe guard the physical security of our network to reduce the instances of disruptions caused by tampering, such as in this incident where a dissatisfied ex-employee caused disruptions by wilfully cutting cables.

We also provide a clean pipe service that comes with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack Detection as a default so that end users can respond quickly to mitigate the impact of such a threat instead of being caught off guard. Our network is also monitored by a 24/7 Integrated Operations Centre that combines Network Monitoring with Security Monitoring. This added layer of network security allows us to quickly detect and respond to network threats. SPTel’s Security Monitoring is delivered by ST Engineering, a world class provider of Security Operations Centres.

These unique aspects of SPTel’s infrastructure protect the network and lower the risk of unexpected service disruptions caused by third-party activities, minimizing operational downtime so your network stays up and running smoothly.

Besides ensuring that businesses have a reliable alternative for their connectivity solutions, SPTel has taken our services to the next level with guaranteed ultra-low latency performance with SPTel’s 2-tier network structure. This lowers the number of hops needed for data to travel for a more responsive network.

This reliable network can even be extended to home offices, supporting auto-fail over of network links even across different carriers.

To find out more about how SPTel can support your business resiliency, click here or reach out to us at emma@sptel.com or 6982 6888.