Tech is a booming business that reaches into every facet of our daily lives. That also means that when problems knock your servers offline, there are costs and consequences to these outages.
Thankfully, there are extensions available that help keep information safe and networks online. IT solutions like these can eliminate issues before they happen and keep unplanned downtime to a minimum. Here’s a brief guide to the nuts and bolts of unexpected downtime.
Causes
A storm can bring down IT at the wrong time. Power lines go down, electricity goes out, and then all the systems are offline. Or perhaps an internet provider is experiencing an outage of its own, so everyone depending on their servers suffers too.
The most frightening potential cause is a cybersecurity breach. A breach means that hackers were able to access the system and put eyes on sensitive data. Cyberattacks are a worst-case scenario, but they’re far from uncommon in today’s digital world.
An outage might also come from a local server or hardware failure. Ensure that your company has good backup routers, networks, switches, and firewalls that come online in case of failure. When it comes to preventing downtime, redundancy is an excellent policy.
Costs
The most obvious cost of unplanned downtimes is financial. Every moment your servers aren’t online, your employees cannot do their regular work, and money is draining away. Estimates say that an hour of unplanned downtime can cost a company more than $100,000 in losses.
Outages also mean that your client won’t be able to access payment or customer service portals, losing your sales and damaging your reputation.
The cost to fix the problem will probably be hefty. It might take a couple of hours or days if it’s severe, and this delay adds insult to injury by further blocking productivity.
Consequences
Besides the cost, there are other consequences to unplanned downtime.
The main concern is a data breach. Losing precious and confidential information to a hacker will put your business, customers, and employees at risk. It’s an uphill battle to recover from the reputational damages of a security breach on your servers.
Unplanned downtime brings lost production time, lack of communication, and revenue loss in the overall business. People’s data needs protection, so when your company can’t deliver on that level of safeguarding, it breaks client trust.
An outage will also weaken IT systems and leave them vulnerable to further cyber security breaches. Backing information up alongside tight security measures will help keep data safe.
Final thoughts
While sometimes unavoidable, you can minimize downtime with proper care and mindful work. Check and update systems, software, and equipment to ensure any bugs and unexpected problems are unlikely. Remember, many viruses exploit systems that don’t update with regular security patches.
By taking the proper security protocols, cybersecurity threats lower immensely, so keep your employees on board and ensure that your systems are backed up to the cloud.