Combating Costly Downtime

IT organizations worldwide are concerned about their ability to evade costly outages and mitigate downtime. Read more.

With digital initiatives and technology becoming omnipresent with business today, one would suppose that companies would be more than ready for an environment where practically every touchpoint with customers is digitalized. Unfortunately, the fact that many big companies experienced major IT outages last year implies that there is still much scope of improvement in administering operations and optimal smooth-running customer experience.

IT organizations worldwide are concerned about their ability to evade costly outages, mitigate downtime, and reliably provide the continuous tech support that customers and partners demand in today's hyper-accelerated dynamic business environment.

Are outages unavoidable?

Any IT personnel will tell you this; performance and availability are top priorities for their department. These two mission-critical priorities beat out security and cost, surprising considering how much attention security gets in today's data-breach sober environment.

Yet the intense focus on keeping the network up and running at peak performance has not prevented downtime. The fact that most of the companies still face a sporadic outage seems bad news if performance and availability are assumed to be the critical considerations for modern organizations.

Network failure, computational surges, manual error, software malfunction and infrastructure that fails are common causes of IT related downtime. However, what is surprising is that enterprises report that more than half of the downtime that they previously experienced could have been prevented.

The actual costs of downtime

Companies with frequent outages can experience up to 15x times the cost when moderating and recovering from downtime than those with better credentials. Actual charges associated with downtime can be encompassed under lost revenue, lost productivity, compliance and mitigation costs, brand erosion, and a lower stock price.

Downtime comes with additional costs for organizations when also impacted by negative media coverage and career disruptions.

Most analysts would state that IT outages and brownouts (periods of dramatically reduced or slowed service) primarily lead to lost revenue, lost productivity and other compliance-related costs. Organizations with frequent outages and brownouts experience:

• 15 times higher expenses compared with alleviating downtime than businesses with few or zero outages
• Nearly twice the number of team members to troubleshoot difficulties related to downtime
• Thrice as long to troubleshoot problems related to downtime.

Downtime Success Mantra

As discussed before, as more than half of the observed outages are avoidable, it adds credibility to the fact that an increasing number of organizations should take proactive steps to prevent such disruptive events. The best-performing organizations are already working round the clock to avoid costly downtime. The actions listed below might act as substantial IT considerations towards such proactive efforts:

• Proactive Monitoring - Currently, many companies are embracing shifting their daily operations to a hybrid or private IT infrastructure, either on-premises and in the cloud. Working in silos to spot trends by using siloed monitoring tools is inefficient and a thing of the past.
• It pays to identify and implement software that comprehensively monitors infrastructures, allowing the troubleshooting team to view systems through a single glass pane. Also, consideration must be ascertained to extensibility and scalability during the selection process to ensure the platform integrates with all present and forecasted technologies.
• It will be worthwhile to use a monitoring solution that provides early warning signs by giving trends that could signify trouble ahead. Data forecasting can be leveraged to prevent an outage before it impacts the business. Teams should formulate a high level of redundancy in their monitoring systems as supplementary methods to avoid downtime. They must concentrate on eliminating single points of failure that might prompt a system to go down.
• It might turn out to be a big mistake in waiting to create an outage response plan. Conceivably, it will never be needed, but it's decisive to have an established arrangement for handling outages from escalation and remediation to information and root cause analysis. Setting a plan on who to involve, when and where to ensure quick response and lesser resolution time is a smart choice to make.
  Best safeguarded organizations can successfully banish downtime from their day-to-day operations through advanced planning and comprehensive monitoring software. In the end, it is feasible to win the IT availability war, with the right alliance of proficient team members and powerful SaaS monitoring technology.

In our fully-managed private cloud offering, VEXXHOST has proactive monitoring with reports generated at regular intervals. This means that we are able to regularly review your cloud and be present to solve issues should they arise. We are here to help your business take a proactive approach and grow with their cloud infrastructure. If you're looking for an expert opinion in preparing in the case of downtime contact our team of experts today.