Data center and network downtime can have a lot more implications than groans from senior management. It causes serious financial losses, along with a negative impact on reputation. While reputation damage may not be quantifiable in the short run, it can affect finances in the future, especially if your company heavily relies on brand reputation.
Studies on the cost of downtime from the Ponemon Institute revealed the following:
- Across industries on average, downtime losses are $7,900 per minute
- A downtime incident’s average length is 86 minutes, so the average cost per incident can go up to $690,200.
Since the operations of many businesses – like yours – are knit together by data centers, IT systems, and networks, downtime reduces the productivity of almost everyone in the company and sidelines a growing percentage of efficient operations.
Fortunately, there are ways to address this downtime. You can take some measures to provide customers and stakeholders with an alternative solution when downtime occurs, and other actions to prevent downtime altogether.
Here’s what you can do:
1. Look into RAID Data Recovery Services
Full RAID repair service providers like Secure Data Recovery are available for businesses to avoid unnecessary downtime after an unexpected event or a server crash. A professional service can prevent major productivity losses by restoring the damaged systems, servers, etc. to an operational state. Some companies also provide remote RAID recovery with fast response times. It’s a more secure option than running file recovery software or trying to rebuild an array on a system with mission-critical data.
2. Secure Authorized Access
Make sure that only authorized personnel have 100% access to systems and servers while everyone else has restricted access (if necessary). That’s because a malware insider can disrupt the process of scheduled backups, including the data and operating system. In case of downtime, an alternative solution is to provide the backup tape to get operations up and running, but that won’t be possible if adversaries disrupt backup processes.
3. Increase Server Security
Some downtime instances happen during cyber attacks. For example, a DDoS attack or a mass SQL-injection can disrupt data center processes, causing servers to malfunction. This means the security of your servers and IT infrastructure should be taken seriously, such as installing reliable security software and investing in a threat intelligence solution to prevent hackers from harming your data center.
4. Have a Migration Plan
While taking actions to prevent downtime, you need to devote time to creating a migration plan that gives instructions to migrate your data and applications to a new data center in case of a server outage. You can create a number of migration plans; each has its own pros and cons. For instance, in a “pick and shift” migration plan, the instruction is to physically migrate the servers to a new data center.
5. Implement Data Center Monitoring
Monitoring ensures that you are notified as soon as a server goes down so you can work on getting them back up and running as soon as possible. Data center monitoring will notify you of server downtime via SMS, email, phone etc. The outcome is that you can quickly make a decision on whether to provide an alternative solution or announce that the downtime will be addressed shortly.
While downtime can’t be completely eliminated, these measures will ensure that the risk of an uptick is company expenses is reduced by a significant amount.
What steps are you taking to address downtime? Please share your tips in the comments below.