Why POS Resellers Need To Provide Business Continuity For Their Clients

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

After a disaster, it’s important to help your merchant clients stay connected to the outside world. Business continuity is crucial in the wake of disasters, when communication is essential.  Disasters can result from hurricanes or earthquakes, but also come in less dramatic forms like having a backhoe sever the cables serving a business or a car accident taking out a utility pole. 

In a presentation at RetailNOW 2015, Tim Aboudara, sales manager at X2nSat, explained why it is important for POS resellers to provide business continuity for merchants — and how it could benefit your business.

“Successful people in the industry have to be true business partners, and that’s the reason business continuity is important,” Aboudara said. “You’re demonstrating to your customer your enhanced value as a business partner when you make sure that they have the tools they need to keep their doors open and to handle customers.”

He explained there are three basic types of business continuity solutions: hard wire (fiber or cable), cellular, and satellite. Each type has both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to staying connected.

Resellers need to emphasize the importance of having a redundancy tool that allows them to stay connected even in the case of failure of their first line of communication. And Aboudara pointed out that it is also important to insure that the backup is not following the same path as the primary line of communication, or they could both be disabled by the same event.

There are three basic types of business continuity: hard wire connection, cellular, and satellite. Each type has both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to staying connected.

• Hard wire connections are fiber or cable that come directly into a place of business. The advantages of wire line are pricing and the ease with which it accommodates existing IT infrastructures. 
• Cellular is becoming more common as a business continuity or redundancy tool, and is also growing in popularity as a primary tool.  The downside of cellular comes with the ability to move data.  While the equipment investment is minimal, and it’s easy to install, you need to ensure that there is enough bandwidth to handle your data stream.
• The third option, VSAT or satellite, has increased in popularity over the last several years. It has the advantage of flexibility of location. A roof antenna facilitates a satellite phone.  And while VSAT technically can be affected by adverse weather, the technology, particularly in enterprise systems, is power controlled, so when weather becomes adverse, the antenna can increase its power to send and receive signals. It is also the most path-diverse option: “You don’t have to worry about where it comes into the building,” he pointed out.