Failover

Failover means having a standby ready to take over the moment something fails — ideally without anyone noticing. In a small office, the most common example is internet failover: your firewall watches your main internet line, and if it drops, traffic switches to a second connection such as a cellular (4G/5G) modem or a second provider. When the main line comes back, traffic switches back.

This matters more every year because so much of a practice now runs in the cloud: practice management and EHR (electronic health record) systems, insurance claims, e-prescribing, Microsoft 365, and internet-based phones. When the internet goes down, the front desk effectively closes. A failover line is usually a small monthly cost compared with even one lost morning — try the downtime cost calculator.

Failover can apply to other things too: a second power supply in a server, a battery backup (UPS) that carries equipment through a brief outage, or a backup system that can run a failed server from a copy. The common idea is the same: no single point of failure for the things you can’t live without.

Example: in our dental practice case study, the office added automatic cellular failover. Provider outages that used to stop check-in and claims now pass without staff noticing. Failover is often handled by an SD-WAN-capable firewall. Read our EHR downtime and internet failover plan for setup options.