It used to be acceptable to consumers if they had to wait for a day or two. However, after a decade of e-commerce and constant access to information on the internet, a company who experiences even a few hours of downtime of their computer systems is looking at real losses of customers and revenue.
However, not all downtime is created equal. For instance, if 90% of your traffic happens between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9 p.m., you can plan overnight maintenance and sustain minimal repercussions, especially if you had been warning your clients of such an outage for weeks. Unplanned occurrences which cause downtime, however, fall into a different category. Because by definition you can’t control an unplanned outage, it could hit you during your busiest season, or during peak hours – in both cases, you may be losing business by the second.
Therefore, it is important to examine the possible procedures your small business can put in place to maximize your system’s uptime.
- Understand the Status of Your Network: Guaranteeing server uptime requires specific intelligence. Data center infrastructure management software can provide you with the information you need, by monitoring fluctuations in traffic, the health of your hardware components, and specific strains on certain elements of your system. By carefully monitoring network health, it is possible to optimize performance and identify potential issues before they have an opportunity to crash your entire system.
- Stay on Top of Security Patches and Software Upgrades: Data centers must safeguard themselves against cybercrime and online attacks in order to maximize uptime. But these threats are ever-changing, forcing cybersecurity professionals to continually design and disseminate patches for existing systems and programs to guard against emerging vulnerabilities. These security patches must be installed promptly – and correctly – or your data center can easily become a cyber-victim, as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities the patches were developed to plug up.
- Proactively Plan for Growth: Because of budget concerns or lack of vision, small to medium sized businesses to often structure their IT network to handle their current business model and traffic. But if a network isn’t designed with an eye towards expansion and growth, it may soon be overwhelmed with traffic it is not capable of handling – causing servers to crash and clients to go elsewhere. Data centers who implement scalable solutions will permit network infrastructure to expand as the needs of the growing business dictate. Data centers can assist their business by utilizing virtualized servers and building appropriate utility support (such as cooling capacity).
Managed services can play several critical roles in ensuring your company uptime.
- We can perform technology and business assessments, and make recommendations for consolidating servers, streamlining processes, and enhancing your safety and online security.
- We can provide redundancies, maintaining fail-over servers and helping to create a disaster recovery strategy in order to effectively react to emergencies and unexpected occurrences.
- We can move critical aspects of your onsite computing to the cloud, where it is always accessible to your end users and clients regardless of the situation at your offices.
- We can provide scalable servers, virtualization and shared server solutions, and economies of scale to help ease the burden of new technology costs on your IT budget.
- We have a team of cyber security experts who can help you to identify threats, gaps and vulnerabilities and correct them; as well as monitoring for new and emerging threats.
- We can provide an expert team, available 24 x 7, who can react to your downtime no matter when it happens.
Your company uptime is critical to the profitability and reputation of your business. Don’t leave it up to chance – call Alliance IT today for a consultation.
