When Facebook, Instagram, and their family of applications goes down, the world takes notice. More than just an inconvenience for its users and a PR nightmare, these outages cost companies big money. Facebook’s outage in March 2019, said to have been caused by a “server configuration change,” is estimated to have cost the company $189 million. And that hasn’t been their only outage in 2019.
While that magnitude of lost revenue isn’t likely for most companies, any potential impact to productivity and your bottom line from an IT standpoint should be mitigated as quickly as possible.
Luckily, this challenge can be easily resolved with regular maintenance and a robust downtime strategy. Unfortunately, many companies are unable to staff full-time employees to perform these tasks. One solution is to outsource to a managed IT service, which can implement remote monitoring and planned downtimes, getting the job done affordably and allowing you peace of mind.
Although losing internet access for an hour may not sound like a crisis, it has the ability to create a massive ripple effect. The cost per hour of downtime includes lost revenue and lost employee productivity; however, it also includes the monetary costs of recovery and intangible costs, such as a damaged reputation.
An example of an unplanned outage and the risk it poses to businesses is a company that migrates their telephone system to voice-over-IP (VOIP) to enjoy the lower costs of data-based calls, but discovers that a hiccup in their internet creates a simultaneous telephone service outage, frustrating customers who are trying to get through and exacerbating simple issues into bigger ones. Or an organization that uses cloud storage suddenly finds they lose access to data, halting production in the middle of the workday. How about an eCommerce company with online sales applications that are unable to write new business due to a glitch in their app? Both the company and their clients lose revenue due to the downtime, and customers are left with a bad taste in their mouth and decide not to come back to complete their purchases. These outages are not just internal productivity issues. They run the risk of clients and customers losing trust in you if they are not handled immediately and appropriately.
Common causes of unplanned IT downtime can be linked to hardware failures, equipment problems, human errors by internal staff, system security attacks and even natural disasters. Luckily, you can reduce downtime by taking proactive measures to prevent it. Some ways to do this are:
The main cost of downtime is the loss of income and customer dissatisfaction. These challenges can be eliminated by implementing a downtime strategy with help from a managed IT provider. A nominal investment in the management of your systems will help ensure that you have a steady flow of income and satisfied customers.