By: Thinix, Ames, IA
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A derecho storm hit the Midwest on August 8, 2020 with wind speeds reaching 80 to 140 mph. It left lots of damage in its wake and thousands were left without power and Internet - our office in Ames, IA included.

Power to our office was luckily restored towards the end of the day on August 9^th, but not our primary Internet. A location that our connection relied on was still without power, causing our office to remain offline. Thankfully our office had RocketFailover^® and iStatus^®!

RocketFailover provides 4G LTE/5G backup Internet to our office. We originally got RocketFailover for our office a few years ago because we frequently lost our primary connection, sometimes for hours at a time. This was frustrating and cut into our operations and revenue as we heavily rely on connectivity to perform daily tasks. When we lost our primary connection after installing RocketFailover, our Internet traffic was automatically routed to the backup connection so we were able to continue operations. When the primary connection was restored, RocketFailover automatically routed the traffic back to the primary connection in order to keep our data usage down.

iStatus is a monitoring platform that uses ConnectionValidaiton™ to constantly test and validate our Internet connections are ready to go. When an issue is detected, our office manager and IT staff are notified so that the issue can be quickly resolved. This helps us get our primary connection restored faster, which also helps to keep our data usage down.

After the derecho storm passed and our office regained power, our primary connection was down for five more days. RocketFailover and iStatus enable our office to open back up and continue operations. By not having to wait for our primary connection, we were able to quickly pick projects back up and make sure important deadlines were met. Time, operations, and revenue was saved thanks to RocketFailover!