How to Minimize I.T. Related Downtime

With the ever increasing importance of technology in the workplace, downtime caused from I.T. disasters have a significant impact on your productivity as well as your company’s finances. In 2011, a survey from CA Technologies found that there was a combined $26.5bn loss in revenue on an annual basis. These businesses stated that, on average, they suffered from around 14 hours of downtime each year.

Using Monitoring Services

Third-party monitoring services will periodically check the strength of your servers to see if your connection is running without any issues. Every few minutes, an automated beacon will send a signal and, if any problems are found, you can be immediately alerted via SMS message, email, phone, or even social media so you can quickly address the situation. Because these solutions are software-based, they can give you constant visibility 24/7, 365 days a year.

Where this will specifically be useful is for the times when you aren’t in the office. While you may not like the idea of being interrupted with work-related problems at home, you’ll appreciate the convenience when you realize the alternative is your website being down the whole weekend. Take a look at some of the top website monitoring products to get a better idea of your options. Many of these services also offer a free trial period so you can test which program works best for your business.

Sourcing Reliable Hardware

Getting your business up and running is both an expensive and stressful process, but that doesn’t mean you should take the easy approach of buying substandard equipment to save money in the short-run. Any money you initially save will be outweighed in the long-run if you have to replace the equipment. The biggest risk you’re taking, though, is the potential loss of important data through a hardware failure.

This is why you should not only source your equipment from reliable vendors like Pinnacle Data from the offset, but also implement a regular upgrade scheme. Most people only buy new equipment when they’re old unit has failed, but of course this is too late. Statistically, a hard drive that’s two-to-three years old is significantly more likely to fail than a comparative unit that’s only one year old. However, no component, no matter how new, is incorruptible so you should always have multiple copies of your data backed up.

Unfortunately, eliminating the chance of these instances from occurring altogether is often out of your hands. Mistakes from third-party hosting companies, server overloads, and power outages can all play their part. However, with the right precautions in place, you can still make efforts to minimize the consequences.