Downtime has to be expected, to some degree, in any business that relies on digital technology. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to be tolerated when it starts to affect your ability to provide services and meet targets. That’s when you need to start looking at the causes of your downtime and make sure that you have the provisions to prevent it. Here, we’re going to look at a few sources and what you might be able to do to get them out of the way.
Bottleneck IT issues
Your internal IT team might be equipped just fine for handling the day-to-day requests of the office, such as lost passwords, trouble accessing files, and so on. However, if your scale has been increasing or you have been having more increasingly complex problems, then a small IT team might not be enough to handle it all. At that point, it may be time to look at outsourcing to a larger service provider.
Human error gets in the way
It’s often not the IT systems themselves that are the problem but simple human error. Sometimes, a few mistakes can result in downtime for the whole business, or at least cause you to spend time in fixing others’ mistakes. Look at the ways that you can automate your own IT operations.
The security shutdown
Malware and hackers can get into your networks. At this point, one of the best courses of action is to shut down your network and prevent people from accessing your IT scope. However, this also greatly limits your team’s ability to function as they should. To that end, you should consider working with cyber security professionals to invest more in preventative methods. Firewalls, anti-malware tools, and quarantining software are just some examples.
Data be gone
Whether it’s caused by unauthorized access and the theft or deletion of crucial data, or simple malfunctions and mistakes putting it out of access, losing the data that keeps your business running can be disastrous. There may be some teams, like sales teams, who rely almost entirely on lead data, who will not be able to do any of their work. For this reason, it’s crucial to ensure that you’re relying on data backup when and where it’s necessary.
Get the power back up
Data isn’t the only thing that you should have a backup for. There are other resources that your IT scope relies on, which electrical power being one of them. Generators are an example of a backup you can use to get systems back up and running within seconds of losing them. Similarly, you should consider using backup connections to the internet in case your provider fails you, with dongles that you can use serving as one suggestion.
Don’t underestimate the costs of downtime, from the productivity you lost to the opportunity loss that might leave your pockets a little lighter. The tips above are an idea of where you should start looking more closely, but make sure you track and measure your own downtime to find more specific solutions, too.
