Why is failover important?
To put it in oversimplified terms: when you depend on a life support machine, you’d be in trouble if it stopped working.
In practice, what businesses today depend on is not only that their websites remain accessible so that customers can find information, contact, and pay the business, but also that they’re able to accept payments properly, show the right information from databases, and so on.
Depending on the business or organisation, the reasons for a particular machine becoming inactive can be various: from simply needing to be temporarily turned off to be updated, to a hardware malfunction, to a purposeful cyber attack.
It’s also a great way to be able to run updates to systems, test them, and revise them in real time, without having to account for total system shutdown.
Failover protocol, then, serves as a key component to enable continuous uptime.