An unplanned downtime may be a pleasant surprise for some of your employees, especially when it happens on a Friday afternoon and they can get an early seat for happy hour. But for management, it’s a nightmare. It means much more than a lost connection. It can mean a loss of data, productivity, reputation and, of course, money. According to Ponemon Institute’s Cost of Data Center Outages report, unplanned network outages costs organizations nearly $15,000 per minute.
These outages can happen in the blink of an eye. It could be a bad storm or flood. It could be a hacker. It could be that nervous intern Alex who knocked his soda all over your equipment. While you can’t plan for these natural or manmade disasters, you can take steps to prepare for them in order to keep downtime to a minimum and assess damage when the unexpected happens.
How To Minimize And Prevent Unplanned Downtime
Develop a Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps you identify where your vulnerabilities are, calculate downtime cost and assess the maximum outage you can endure before feeling the effects of it. Conducting a BIA makes you think about what could actually happen during an unplanned downtime and to plan accordingly. Keep an eye out for our follow-up article specifically about BIAs later this month.
Invest in Cyber Security
When your server is down, your infrastructure’s vulnerability goes up. Are you properly protected? For example: is failover automatic, or does it require intervention? If you have to move to a new location, how will you maintain proper security for devices on a temporary server? You need to put comprehensive security systems and strategies in place to protect your business when downtimes occur.
Proactively Protect Your Hardware and Software
Remember the old Boys Scouts’ motto, “Be Prepared”? That goes for your IT team as well. A preventative maintenance program should be in place and your staff should be trained to proactively protect your equipment. This may require you to refresh your asset inventory. There are several software programs designed to auto-discover everything on your network.
Schedule Regular Backups
You already know this, right? Just because you’re supposed to do something doesn’t mean you’re doing it. A recent study found that 99% of all businesses do not perform daily backups, that 60% of backups are incomplete, and that 50% of restores fail. So...implement backup procedures, okay? Create a schedule. Test the backup restoration feature. Be ready!
Get Skilled Help from a Managed IT Services Provider
By using a managed IT services provider, you’ll have an experienced team overseeing your systems. Their familiarity with your network will be crucial should your business be hit with an unplanned downtime event.
If you’re in need of managed IT support, RCN Business Managed Services offers a wide range of solutions to help prevent the damaging impact unplanned server downtimes can have on your business. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how our solutions help remove the complexities associated with managing mission-critical applications.
IT Disaster Recovery Planning: Essential to Business Survival
There’s no threshold for vulnerability when it comes to disasters. Whether natural or manmade, catastrophic events don’t discriminate based on the type of business, its size, age or location. Many businesses think they're too small to need a plan when, in fact, an effective IT disaster recovery plan may be the difference between company survival or failure.
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