Platform Reliability

Whether people are tele-working from home or working halfway around the world, providing continuous access for the remote and mobile workforce is crucial. Since 2001, iPass' authentication fabric has delivered 100 percent uptime.

Architectural Redundancy
To ensure connection availability and reliability for enterprise customers, iPass employs redundant systems at all critical points across its platform:

• Multiple providers ensuring redundant geographic coverage
• Redundant iPass systems at access provider sites
• Numerous globally distributed Transaction Centers with both internal redundancy and BGP-based fail-over capabilities to protect against regional disruptions. Each Transaction Center is linked to the Internet via multiple Tier 1 providers.
• Redundancy in iPass systems deployed at the customer network edge

In the rare event of a hardware, software or provider failure anywhere in the system, sophisticated automatic fail-over algorithms ensure continuous service availability.

Patented Service Quality Management
iPass has developed the patented iPass Service Quality Management (SQM) system. This technology helps iPass monitor and optimize the actual user connection experience, as well as model and measure the quality of critical components throughout the iPass global virtual network.

The SQM system enables iPass to monitor the overall integrity of the network and manage the performance of access providers. Using SQM data, iPass can assess connection performance by access point, access provider or region, and identify any access points with statistically lower connection rates than the rest of the network. This way iPass can locate and resolve access point problems ・typically before the network provider is aware of an issue. The ability to detect provider-specific trends and problems, even when the general network is functioning, holds access providers to the highest service levels.

Network Monitoring—Mobility
iPass network operations center (NOC) staff manage and monitor the different components of the iPass connectivity architecture 24x7. Regional iPass help desks troubleshoot common issues and support enterprise IT staff.

NOC staff have easy access to all data collected by iPass Service Quality Management (SQM) clients and agents worldwide. This data is collected and aggregated into reports that detail access point performance, individual and corporate connection success rates, provider-level averages and other critical statistics. Using this network intelligence, iPass is able to set an increasingly high level of performance and global accountability.

iPass also sets a variety of service-level thresholds to ensure network reliability and performance. Whenever test results exceed a predefined threshold, an alert is automatically sent to iPass network operations staff, allowing iPass to promptly evaluate and troubleshoot the issue, helping the affected provider perform focused root-cause analysis.