As soon as someone plugged in the first computer for business use, there’s been a risk of downtime. While one technology problem after another has been vanquished, downtime continues to plague enterprises. The Zetta State of Disaster Recovery survey found that over half of IT professionals report having to handle a downtime incidence lasting at least eight hours in the past five years.
Downtime doesn’t have to be an accepted part of IT life. There are ways to address it:
First, know where your risk is coming from. It’s a good first step to stop assuming, and instead measure, where your risk of attack is heaviest. You might assume it’s a virus, and this is certainly a common cause, but it’s not the top contender for taking down your systems. The survey shows that viruses and malware rank fourth for downtime, while power outages rank first. Taking second and third place are hardware errors and user errors, respectively.
These causes of downtime can be hard to prevent, but not so challenging that you should simply give up and accept the inevitability of downtime. You need a plan, one that is tested and proven to be effective.
Go after downtime with both redundancy and diversity. Redundancy is a good place to start. For example, having two fiber connections is better for avoiding unexpected connectivity problems.
What creates a more decisive strategy is diversity. Rather than simply doubling up for redundancy, the idea is to create different strategies for how the application is protected from a failure. Making sure that redundant connections follow different routes and have different equipment supporting them can help eliminate the risk of failure.
Using these two approaches to eliminating downtime results in some clear benefits:
- The ability to keep the team working and connected, even during a power outage
- Ensuring business continuity, even in a case where there has been a fiber cut during a transport disruption
- Keeping the network connected to critical endpoints by using alternate failover options
- Avoiding any undetected traps by covering every aspect of the network with protective steps
Invest in applications for managing downtime risks. There are cloud solutions that can add diversity to a network and give IT the peace of mind to know that downtime is managed.
Talk with Truthcomm about identifying the right downtime strategy. Contact us for an appointment to talk more about the variety of telecom solutions available.