No business, small or large, wants to experience downtime. Whether you’re in the manufacturing or pharma industry, the financial cost and ramifications of downtime can be significant. Downtime can also expose the users to various systems flaws and vulnerabilities, which impacts the level of trust that users and consumers have towards an organization. This can be detrimental for a business, often resulting in losses that are difficult to recover from.

What is Downtime?

Downtime simply refers to the amount of time when an online operation stops working. Online customers and users expect every program to work around the clock without any hitch. This is a very common expectation that people have with machines. Nonetheless, you will find them blindly trusting all online applications and utilities to be available at any time of the day.

Not to mention, organizations that run online operations also promise their clients to function without any downtime at all. This is why when they face this nuisance, it costs an organization plenty in terms of lost revenue. You can calculate the downtime costs by analyzing the cost of the labor revenue, along with the cost of the hourly revenue that you generate.

These are just the hard costs that you will incur. It does not even take into consideration the cost of all the customers that you can lose. For instance, if you are unable to deliver a product because of the downtime, your customer can simply go elsewhere to look for the product.

Overall, there will always be a monetary value that companies will lose if they ever face downtime and business disruptions. Furthermore, as networks transition to the cloud, there has been a culture shift amongst the software-defined networks. Due to this, downtime can be anything from a data center going offline to users being unable to connect their devices to the cloud.

Top Causes of Network Downtime

There are plenty of reasons why a network may go down. Nonetheless, some causes of network downtime are more common than others. One of the root causes for significant outages that are common in today’s age is a human misconfiguration. Many times the changes made by the developers are not well thought out. As a result, slight human errors often lead to major network downtime.

The other cause is an external threat or social engineering. This includes all actions that take place outside your organization. This could be an email incident, phishing attack, malicious invasions, or more. These reflect actions that people will take against your organization, and it typically comes from outside your company.

Another cause of network downtime is hardware failure. It is one of the most obvious reasons that people will first point to. Today, you do not really expect machines to malfunction or have a glitch. However, this is not to say that it cannot happen, and there is always a risk.

For example, hard drives, like all components, have a lifespan, and they may not work well if you use them past their useful life. Hardware failures can affect all the pieces of technology within your organization.

How to Minimize Network Downtime?

The most crucial thing when it comes to successful network outage remediation measures is to have a proactive monitoring platform. This means that you should have a separate or redundant interface alongside your operable network that is capable of tracking changes as they happen and also predicting the outages before they occur.

You can also find software systems that will monitor the integral parts of your network and detect unauthorized changes. The second method of minimizing downtime requires you to have a systematic change process that includes adequate documentation.

Work Collectively!

Finally, minimizing downtime risks will also require you to have a solid remediation team that specializes in recovering from and minimizing the cost of network downtime. It should be able to spot a potential outage before it even occurs.

If you wish to have a team of experts investigate the network downtime risks that your organization faces and offer solutions that make your interface full-proof, you should contact Prescient to integrate cloud-based innovations into your business. Prescient also partners with Datto, a sophisticated service that works closely on disaster recovery solutions and manages downtime costs.