According to recent research by LogicMonitor, IT departments in the UK prioritise availability and performance over anything else.
These factors are viewed as more vital than cost or security but despite this, efforts aren’t actually ruling out the risk of extended downtime.
Here we look at how you can prevent downtown in your network or IT systems with some simple steps.
Why is avoiding downtown important?
Some 96 per cent of the respondents in the above study admitted to having experienced at least one incidence of their network going down over the past three years.
Common causes include everything from human error and failures in infrastructure, to usage surges and network failures.
However, around half of the IT departments questioned said their outages were preventable.
If outages do happen in your business, you can expect costs to include lost productivity, reduced revenue and compliance-related costs, among others.
Top tips to avoid outages
Monitoring
Proactive monitoring of your IT hardware can help you identify warning signs that sometimes occur prior to hardware failure. It can also spot where systems are surprisingly close to their resource limits.
Infrastructure can be monitored using specific software and cloud services. Make sure the tech you use is scalable and that it can be fully integrated into your current systems to allow it to work properly.
Beyond watching for warning signs, it’s important to look at overall system design.
IT teams should look at implementing an appropriate level of redundancy in their systems, so hardware failures can be worked around automatically, or failing that, backup hardware is available to quickly replace faulty kit.
Security
Downtime is also a risk related to poor cybersecurity of course, and cyber attacks such as Denial of Service attacks will lead to network outages that can last for days or even weeks.
Ensuring you are investing in cybersecurity, such as managed firewalls and business continuity measures will help your business to minimise disruption in the case of a cyberattack.
Remember, if you are experiencing frequent service outages or network downtime, your business will be feeling the effects.
Staff will be unable to do their work. And IT staff will need to spend time firefighting, rather than working on more strategic activities.
System downtime can also harm an organisation’s reputation.
However, much downtime is preventable, so these problems are preventable.
Explore Syntura’s Business Continuity solutions and learn how to minimise the impact of outages on your business.