Four common reasons firms face downtime

There isn’t a great deal of tolerance for downtime. In a world where technology is increasingly available and accessible in all areas of our lives, it can be both shocking and immediately frustrating when it is suddenly no longer there. As someone who has been providing IT services for many years (and therefore responsible for the uptime of systems), the threat of downtime can bring on a cold sweat: the barrage of emails and calls to query/ complain/ demand and the pressure to get things back up and running again as soon as possible.

Downtime is traumatic for all parties. But it shouldn’t be. For two reasons. One: downtime is going to happen at some point and we all should be able to cope with this. It’s very rarely the end of the world, whatever we may feel at the time. Let’s get a bit of perspective. Two: the risk of downtime can be minimised through good system and process design. If we undertake this well, and communicate it to all relevant parties, we can all manage the (hopefully rare) situations when downtime occurs with more confidence and understanding.

Here are the four most common reasons firms face downtime:

Power outage – Whether it’s down to adverse weather conditions, equipment failure, human error or something unexpected (we once had an annual DR test ruined by a Canadian Geese strike…), power outages can stop on premises systems, which often only have a single source of power, dead in their tracks. Having only one source of power is a huge risk factor.

Internet outage – Many, if not most, of our systems now rely on connectivity so losing net access can be paralysing. As above, the key here is not to have critical systems supported by a single feed. Dual feeds and diverse suppliers will provide the necessary redundancy.

Hardware failure – All hardware has a lifespan. And all hardware components can fail. If you can afford it, ensure hardware redundancy and maintain this is an appropriately managed environment. Do not keep your office bottles of Prosecco in the server room…yes I have seen this!

Network problems – Hardware failure, misconfiguration, dodgy cables, network loops. It’s critical that your organisation uses the proper expertise to manage your network which can easily be taken out by one person plugging in a cable in the wrong place. And networks in large organisations can be extremely complicated, which can often extend downtime due to the time required to identify root causes. Expertise. Documentation. Monitoring. All the basics.

Reducing the risk of downtime by moving from on-prem to hosted 

To reduce the risk of downtime in your organisation, you need to limit the exposure that your system has to these key risk elements. Hosted solutions, for example, often minimise the risk of downtime because they are typically held in physically secure, environmentally managed data centres with extensive redundancy for the common points of failure, which generally includes dual and diverse power feeds, backup generators, dual and diverse connectivity, high availability configuration of equipment and more.

Hosted infrastructure also reduces dependency on your office (or home) infrastructure, which will likely only have one power and internet feed.

Though hosted solutions can be more expensive than on-prem options, there exists a range of options and suppliers to meet different budgetary requirements from public to private cloud arrangements.  It’s not a one size fits all solution and it’s important for any organisation to find the right balance of price, risk mitigation and operational fit.

To provide an example, London-based architectural company, Cullinan Studio, moved its entire server infrastructure and workstation resources to the cloud to build resiliency and to ensure that no matter where employees were based, they could continue working on the same infrastructure with the same high level of performance.     

And this also enabled the firm to make better use of its building – a Victorian, former industrial property on the canal side in Islington. It was able to pull its own office footprint back to just one of the building’s three floors and use the newly free space to create a multi-disciplinary hub that it could sublet to tenants as a revenue driver.  

Final thoughts

Downtime will happen for you and your organisation at some point, no matter how well managed your infrastructure. But areas of vulnerability and potential impact can be addressed to reduce the likelihood and the damage it can incur and provide you with, hopefully, confidence in your systems (and their poor administrators) when, and if, it happens.