We are accustomed to our lights turning on when we flip the switch, and our phone to notify us when a new email arrives. Our world is constantly on “uptime”, and when something we rely on goes down, it is a serious inconvenience.
But for small business, even a few hours of downtime is more than inconvenient – it can be catastrophic. Every small-to-medium sized business should put safeguards in place to prevent unexpected downtime whenever possible – and they should have a plan on how to react should downtime occur.
How Unexpected Downtime Can Hurt Your Business
- Lost Productivity: In today’s automated world, if the system is down, people cannot do their job. This may be ok for 10 minutes – or even an hour or two – but pretty soon, you are paying people to sit around and get very little done.
- Lost Orders: If you cannot process orders, you lose business. Whether phone operators are entering orders, or your online system processes customer requests, every order you cannot place is a lost opportunity. What’s worse, consumers today are not very patient, and most often move onto another vendor if your site is not available. Sadly, they also do not always return. This means that you lose business not only today, but in the future.
- Lost Confidence: Whether it is fair or not, when a consumer encounters a website which keeps freezing up, or they cannot access their account – they ten to quickly lose confidence in the organization. Just one day of unexpected downtime could lead to a host of customers leaving for a more “reliable” service.
You may not think that a small business would lose much in the way of profit during a short period of downtime. Relatively speaking, this is true. However, a small business also has a much lower tolerance for the losses it can absorb, making even a small outage a concern.
How to Avoid Unexpected Downtime
- Look for Weakness: Whether you are running an outdated anti-virus software or have power cords running across your office space – you need to assess where potential threats lie. Take one day to assess the physical and cyber safety of the company, and determine if there are quick fixes which can take place which will eliminate some of the most obvious possibilities for a failure. If you need help, call Alliance IT for a technology and business environment assessment.
- Call for Back Up: Be sure that you have a backup generator to keep the facility up and running in the face of an outage, even if it is just long enough to power down logically and not lose data. Best case scenario is to keep your orders processing and your phones operational until you can advise your clients and contractors what is happening – and how you are fixing the problem.
- Be Redundant: A mirrored server which is located offsite can keep your data safe even if you lose your facility and onsite hardware, and a redundant data network (two carriers) can ensure that if one experiences problem, the other can pick up the slack.
- Don’t Be Cheap: Although many small businesses try to save money by not having enterprise-grade hardware and software, your organization is much stronger and better protected with higher end equipment. You may also look into server virtualization and sharing the costs of high end equipment upgrades through the usage of managed services.
Alliance IT can help you to harden your own facility in order to minimize the chances of unexpected downtime; or can take over the responsibility for your network connectivity through a managed services agreement. Whichever scenario you feel is best for your company, we are here to assist.
