How to Prevent the Crippling Effects of Downtime

Downtime is a critical problem with many businesses that have limited IT budgets. Organizations need to ensure that their bottom line is as high as possible, but if you’re constantly plagued by persistent downtime, your business is losing money when it doesn’t need to. We’re here to inform you about downtime, and what it can cost your business if it’s not addressed promptly.

Downtime, as reported by the Gartner IT Glossary, is “the total time a system is out of service.” This could be the result of an unexpected hardware failure, a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), or even from the theft or destruction of critical data as a result of a virus or other threat. Regardless, any situation where your systems are left offline and inoperable for an extended period of time, could have devastating effects on your business.

To put it in simpler terms, any time where your systems aren’t running, is time that your team isn’t working. It’s time where your servers aren’t collecting data. It’s time where your business isn’t collecting new leads. Downtime is equivalent to lost profits and opportunities, both of which can hurt your business in the long run and hinder its growth. As reported by NetworkComputing, an estimated $700 billion is lost every year due to information and communications technology outages. Included in this number are lost employee productivity, lost revenue, and the cost of resolution.

There are several causes of downtime, but one of the worst is hardware failure or problems with your equipment. Many organizations still use the same technology they’ve been using for the past five, or even ten years, which can be a major detriment and an unnecessary risk. This is most often the case if a small or medium-sized business doesn’t have the funds on-hand and readily available to regularly upgrade hardware and software solutions.

If your business has a downtime problem, you should look into solutions that are capable of getting your systems back online as quickly as possible following a crippling disaster. One of the most critical components of doing so is a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, otherwise known as a BDR device. BDR can protect your business’s assets in the event of a catastrophic data loss or theft scenario. BDR takes multiple backups daily, allowing for minimal data loss. This data can then be deployed to your systems via the cloud, allowing for a swift recovery process that minimizes downtime. In fact, the BDR device can temporarily act as your server while you work toward getting a downed server back online, effectively eliminating the cost of expensive downtime.

In general, taking proactive measures to guarantee the minimum amount of downtime possible are encouraged, especially when it comes to the IT of small and medium-sized businesses. Monitoring your systems to ensure that no critical system failure is approaching is a good way to stay on top of your IT budget. Outsourcing this responsibility to a third party whose sole job it is to handle these issues is the ideal way to approach proactive IT maintenance.

Preferred can equip your business with both a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, as well as remote monitoring and maintenance. We can spot the telltale signs of minor issues before they blossom into big, ugly problems that can cause expensive downtime. Trust us; your budget will appreciate it.