Many of our customers are unaware that they can have multiple gateways. We’d like to take this opportunity to remedy this, as a backup gateway has several benefits.
What is a backup gateway?
A backup gateway provides the same functionality as your primary gateway. In fact, additional gateway is a more fitting term, as providing backup is just one of the use cases of having several gateways in your software-defined perimeter (SDP).
Why do you need an additional gateway?
There are two main reasons why organizations deploy additional gateways—performance and high availability.
Better performance
Organizations whose employees are spread across several countries or continents should deploy gateways to provide a nearer access point.
Accessing the SDP via a nearer gateway improves speed and latency, which results in better user experience for employees (e.g. less lag during video calls).
Companies with a very large number of users can also deploy more gateways to spread the load and avoid throttling during peak hours.
High availability
There are also scenarios where the extra gateway is there primarily to provide backup. Even though we do our utmost to ensure 100% uptime, external factors out of our control can still cause outages.
Our gateways are all in the cloud, but they still have to run somewhere in a local data center. These data centers sometimes undergo planned outages due to maintenance, and the affected gateway is down temporarily as a result.
However, unplanned outages can also happen. The most common source of unexpected outages are connectivity issues from local providers. These occur from time to time, but are entirely out of our control.
Other reasons include natural disasters like fires, earthquakes, floods, or hurricanes, that may damage the data center or cause a widespread power outage.
Geopolitical reasons are also a factor, whether this means a shift in national policy on internet services or an outright war in the region.
Having a backup gateway to provide redundancy is a sure method of preserving business continuity in all these scenarios.
For some organizations, GoodAccess is the only way to access critical systems. In such cases, a backup gateway is a must-have.
How to deploy an additional gateway
Adding another gateway is easy. You can do so from the Control Panel, in the Gateways section.
Please note that adding a gateway will incur an additional monthly cost of US$39.
Your new gateway will provide the same functionalities as your primary gateway. You’ll also be able to monitor the users and devices connected to the gateway to assess the load across your gateways.
Summary
Having multiple gateways in your SDP can significantly improve your company’s network performance and provide backup during outages. Deploying an additional gateway is straightforward and well worth your while, if taking into account the losses incurred during unforeseen downtime or as a result of poor user experience.
