Downtime is a dreaded word in the business community. When a company's network is no longer operational, it cannot serve its customers, organize remote workers, or analyze its data. To put it bluntly, it's a disaster.
Even so, it remains something that companies around the world endure every week. Employees go into the office on Monday morning, believing that everything is fine and then find out in the afternoon that the systems are down and they can't work.
The main reasons for downtime aren't what you imagine. It's not nefarious hackers trying to bring your business to its knees for their own amusements. More often, it's something boringly technical, like insufficient bandwidth - or too many people trying to access too few computing resources.
No entrepreneur wants to admit that the reason their business failed was because of downtime, but it is something that happens. When networks fail, bosses face a stark choice between going to their creditors and asking for more money or shutting down their firms. It's a tough call.
While you don't hear very often about companies going out of business because of downtime, it does happen. Usually, it is smaller firms with much tighter cash flow situations that need money coming in all the time to make ends meet. Without a constant stream of money coming into their bank accounts, they're unable to pay suppliers and staff, leading to the failure of the business.
Fortunately, there's no need for companies to experience downtime at all, let alone for it to be a reason they go out of business.
Kortek Solutions points out that there are two approaches to company IT. First, there's the break-fix model where you carry on as usual until something goes wrong. The majority of SMEs in the country operate under this paradigm, hoping every morning that their systems will make it through the day.
The alternative - and better - approach is to perform proactive maintenance on the network. Here you're continually monitoring it for problems so you can troubleshoot issues BEFORE they lead to downtime.
Most people in business would agree that the latter is preferable. It is much better to nip a problem in the bud before it leads to downtime than wait for the issue to explode and having a full-blown crisis on your hands. And yet, very few leaders operate this kind of IT strategy, preferring to dice with financial death instead.
Being proactive with IT is much more straightforward than you might imagine. Usually, it just involves predicting network usage and then comparing it to the resources actually required by your people. Sometimes, it can include things like ensuring that you make regular backups through the cloud so that you can restore your systems in the event of an emergency. To put it bluntly, it's simple.
