Downtime can be lethal to businesses, not only because too much can lead to failure, but it can easily waste a lot of your team’s time as everyone shifts gears to find a solution. This is why is it best to avoid it as often as possible.
That’s why we’re discussing three of the most prevalent causes of downtime, and what you can do to prevent them.
Your Technology is Unreliable
Faulty technology is often the inciting incident behind downtime. Hardware occasionally fails and needs to be replaced, which takes time. Outdated or buggy software frequently crashes. In either case, proactive monitoring and maintenance can help ward off these issues.
This is why we recommend businesses implement remote patching and maintenance tools. These tools allow such issues to be addressed simultaneously and automatically, applying all fixes to every networked machine.
Your Users Lack Training
User error is behind plenty of IT issues, and downtime is no exception.
User error can be defined as any situation where an employee makes a mistake or is unfamiliar with the full capabilities of the tools they use. Downtime is usually involved in whatever situation applies. Making this issue more potent is the fact that you’ll generally face one of two scenarios:
- Your users adjust and develop their own, typically inefficient processes, and the only way you realize there’s an issue is if you monitor their performance or catch it in your business metrics.
- An accident or mistake could snowball into larger problems, interrupting operations.
However, both can be reduced drastically by properly training your team members.
You Didn’t Expect the Unexpected
Life can very easily take us by surprise, and in the case of business, this surprise can translate to challenges and interruptions. There is no shortage of events that typically lead to some amount of downtime, most of which being categorized as either natural disasters or security breaches.
Weather events—whether a hurricane, tornado, blizzard, severe thunderstorm, or other—can all potentially pause your operations. The same can be said of the litany of cyberattacks out there… your business could be stuck in a holding pattern until these issues are resolved appropriately. While these circumstances are inherently unpredictable, you can and should devise contingency plans to address them.
Protect Your Business from Downtime
Unfortunately, no one can eliminate your business’ risk of downtime. It simply isn’t feasible, as too many factors and variables are involved. That said, there are things that you can (and again, should) do to protect as much of your productivity as possible.
The first step is devising a business continuity plan. This plan consolidates all of the above considerations (as well as many others) to evaluate the risk of each and puts safeguards and contingencies in place to minimize the impact of any form of disaster. Next, you need a data backup and disaster recovery plan to facilitate this business continuity plan. Protecting your data (which is easily your business’ most critical asset) puts you in a much better position to recover from an unpleasant event.
If this sounds like a lot, Coleman Technologies is here to help. Call us at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.
