Are You Experiencing Frequent IT Outages?

Are You Experiencing Frequent IT Outages?

Do you know how much downtime and IT outages cost your business? According to the Data Center Knowledge, data center downtime costs an average of $7,900 per minute. Whether it’s a few minutes or several days, any kind of IT downtime can incapacitate your business and cost you money both during the outage and for weeks after.

Why Do IT Outages Happen?

IT outages occur for a wide range of reasons ranging from vendor failures, technical failures, and even attacks.

Some of the more common culprits include:

• Human error
• Cyber attacks
• Change process failure
• Hardware failure
• Insufficient testing
• UPS battery failure

An IT outage can even be as simple as someone at your site unplugging a device without realizing it.

5 Risks Associated with IT Outages

When your IT infrastructure goes down, it causes both short-term and lasting problems. The five biggest risks associated with IT outages are:

1. Loss of revenue
2. Business disruption
3. Cost of repair
4. Damage to reputation
5. Loss of employee productivity

When your infrastructure fails, your losses go further than an inability to process sales. Your employees can’t do their jobs, and even all the backend business that keeps you afloat comes to a grinding halt.

The bottom line: an outage costs you more than a lost sale or five. The total loss also includes the costs required to get your infrastructure and your business back up and running again – and those are the costs that cripple businesses.

What Can You Do to Prevent IT Outages?

The only way to avoid frequent IT outages is to prevent them actively. That often means identifying the symptoms of a potential outage and using intelligence to mitigate or even eliminate the coming outage.

Among the sources of outages that you can prevent, minimizing human error is a top priority. Surveys commonly report human error as the most frequent and significant cause of downtime.

Maintaining a watch over services, avoiding any faults like unplugging a power cord, and never hitting the wrong switch, and ensuring proper installation is essential. Other essential practices to avoid human error issues include:

• Establishing standard procedures
• Documenting each task
• Providing ongoing IT assessment for employees
• Using secure access policies

A disaster recovery plan is also critical for dealing with the outages you can’t prevent. Data back-up programs are essential for protecting your data and being able to reach it even if your systems are down.

Outsourced IT Can Help

Don’t have the time or expertise to manage your IT services or the funds to hire a full-time employee to do it for you?

Outsourcing your IT support through a managed IT service eliminates your technology-based headaches and keeps your business up and running.

SemTech IT Solutions. We’re always here for you. We provide fully managed IT services that include the active prevention of IT outages and back-up plans to ensure that one fault doesn’t take down your entire business. We also cover IT vendor management, hardware maintenance and updates, remote network monitoring and maintenance, and helpdesk services to keep your downtime to an absolute minimum.