It’s easy to imagine all the ways that downtime can throw a wrench into your critical remote infrastructure operations. Things like scaling, service outages, and tedious management are just part of the job. No matter how much these stand in the way of business, there’s not much that you can do about them, right?

Not quite. In this post, we’ll explore three reasons your complex critical remote infrastructure is costing you, and how Nodegrid is the simple solution that helps you save.

If you’re short on time, here’s a two-minute video explaining how you can cut through the complexity of managing your network.

Deploying critical remote infrastructure

You’re probably familiar with long deployment times for your critical remote infrastructure. Manually provisioning and setting up networks consumes a lot of time and resources. The obvious costs here are the staff wages and device shipping expenses; however, the not-so-obvious cost is the business opportunity that you miss. The longer it takes you to deploy, the longer your location goes without meeting demand or generating revenue.

How can you minimize this cost? By using zero touch provisioning.

Zero touch provisioning uses automation to automatically configure and build your networks. Instead of putting staff on site to manually set up each device in your stack, you can instruct even unskilled staff to simply plug in and boot your devices. Zero touch provisioning does the rest of the work and can bring you online in hours.

Not all zero touch provisioning is the same, though. Most vendors only allow you to use it for their devices or products, which means unless you standardize on their offerings, you’re going to be limited in terms of what systems and services you can automatically deploy. On top of this, you still need to pre-configure devices and put sensitive info at risk, as well as perform manual orchestration and firmware updates.

This is where Nodegrid sets itself apart. Because it features the vendor-neutral Nodegrid OS, it allows you to use your choice of automation tools as well as build custom scripts to orchestrate across devices and environments. This means you can use true zero touch provisioning that extends to every part of your infrastructure — from configuring end devices from different vendors, to bootstrapping VMs, activating service licenses, and setting up your entire network. It offers airtight security as well, because you can completely provision bare-metal devices via ZPE Cloud.

When it comes to your critical remote infrastructure, Nodegrid is your go-to solution for fast, complete, and secure network deployments.

Keeping critical remote infrastructure online

How often does your critical remote infrastructure go offline? When it does, you can suffer losses at a rate of $5,000 or more per minute, according to Gartner. And this only covers the monetary portion. You also need to consider the reputation damage, degradation of trust, and decreased customer satisfaction that result from sudden outages.

If you’re familiar with redundant solutions, you know that these can be a life saver — but on the other hand, they come with two times the number of solutions that you need to purchase, deploy, and manage.

You typically need to deploy two boxes for each function you wish to add redundancy to, and connect them in a high availability configuration. In other words, two firewalls, two routers, two SD-WAN boxes, etc. All this means the initial and ongoing burden of redundancy can be…off-putting.

However, Nodegrid devices feature a powerful hypervisor that allows you to deploy virtualized network functions (VNFs). The onboard, multi-core Intel CPU and Linux-based Nodegrid OS provide you with enough resources to spin up VMs, guest operating systems, applications, and Docker containers directly on Nodegrid appliances. Instead of spending tons of money on more devices that clutter your infrastructure and management efforts, you can host firewalls, virtual routers, SD-WAN solutions, and custom and third-party solutions on one box. You can easily shrink a redundant setup of six devices into two Nodegrid boxes.

Beyond covering your network services with redundancy, Nodegrid also gives you built-in 5G/4G LTE connectivity available via two and four SIM cards, respectively. You don’t have to worry about a main line outage taking down an entire office or store location. Nodegrid automatically switches to your backup cellular connections, so you can keep critical remote infrastructure online and operations running.

Responding to critical remote infrastructure problems

It can be difficult to manage critical remote infrastructure because it’s, well, remote. You may have store locations that are very far away from any skilled IT staff. Or you may operate in an industry such as utilities or oil and gas, where you have critical components distributed across power grids or offshore drilling platforms.

Unless you have a robust remote management tool in place, you’re losing time and money responding to problems. This also means the user experience suffers and is difficult to optimize.

For your business, the losses can start to pile up even before an issue is reported. Your efforts are pulled into managing and dispatching IT teams for on-site support, while users and customers put up with poor network performance or even complete outages.

But when you use Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud, you gain in-depth management capabilities that allow you to fully support your network from a distance. You can save significantly on operational costs by reducing or eliminating the need to roll support trucks. That’s because ZPE Cloud gives you a complete view of your distributed infrastructure, and gives you convenient remote access to manage all your solutions. Use your browser to securely connect without a VPN. You can instantly troubleshoot issues and even reboot devices from thousands of miles away.

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