How to Minimize IT Downtime in Your Company

Too much downtime can seriously cripple any company’s attempts to grow. If your employees are sitting around waiting for their system to come back on then every passing minute sees more frustrated customers and greater losses.

“Computer Problems” by  (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Some reports suggest that businesses in North America lose $700 billion each year due to IT downtime. Fixing this is clearly a major concern but how can you go about reducing this lost time and increasing your profits?

Use the Right Equipment

A common problem is that a lot of companies simply use the wrong equipment. As with anything else in life, if you use something that isn’t fit for purpose, then the results that you get are going to be less than ideal.

There are a number of ways that this could happen. For example, you might have outdated equipment that needs to be upgraded urgently. Is it time to upgrade your technology in this case? Alternatively, it might be that maintenance is needed to get it working as well as it should do.

Therefore, the first step should be to see what kind of equipment is being used. If changes are needed, then it could turn out to be a fairly expensive solution, but one that gives you complete peace of mind to move forward with confidence.

Look for Uptime Guarantees

When you deal with any type of vendor you should always look for guarantees about the service that is provided. Yet, not every business takes the care needed to ensure that they have a proper uptime guarantee in place.
This sort of promise will typically assure you that you will achieve an uptime of very close to 100% each month. While this isn’t enough to be totally convinced that you won’t suffer any downtime at all in the month, it will help to take off some of the pressure.

If the downtime suffered is below their guaranteed level, then you can expect to receive a partial refund on the fee that you paid. While this might not be the ideal solution, it will at least give you some comfort, as well as ensure that the service provider does their very best for you at all times.

Use a Load Balancer Service

In many cases, the problems come down to network issues, as different devices in the company are unable to communicate with one another. This is a major issue, and part of it can come down to poor distribution of traffic across your servers.

A clever way of ensuring that this traffic is handled better comes with the use of a load balancer. This is a service that constantly works out how best to distribute traffic across different servers to keep downtime at an absolute minimum.

This approach increases your response time and also avoids the risk of any individual resource being over-worked. It is easy to implement and produces fast results that allow everyone in the company to work more smoothly.

By taking all of these points into account, it is possible to make downtime a thing of the past in your business.