Insurance is everywhere in today's world: Car insurance, house insurance, life insurance-but what about your facility, the equipment inside, and, most important, your industrial network? What ensures that the lifeblood of your operation will continue to function if a failure occurs? Can you afford the risk-and the expense-of outages and the associated downtime they can create? Consider the cost of one production stoppage at your plant. How much effort is needed to recover and restart the process? How much product may be lost? How much downtime will be incurred, and how much will it cost per minute, per hour, per day?
Whether your facility is involved in discrete or process operations, ensuring that it runs uninterrupted is critical to your bottom line. One way to minimize the risk of unplanned outages and help reach the goal of continuous operation is to ensure that your communications keep flowing with a back-up, or redundant network.
How can redundancy help? Automation pervades most modern plant systems, and those systems are nearly always part of the network infrastructure. When a failure occurs, it happens most often within the network. Redundancy so often, then, can be the mechanism to respond and reduce the effects of these failures, making an investment in a redundant system money well spent. When applied to the communications infrastructure, redundancy not only minimizes the risk of outages and maximizes uptime, it provides the stable operational performance so critical to facilities in our current fragile economy.