According to recent research by LogicMonitor, IT departments in the UK prioritise availability and performance over anything else. These factors are viewed as more vital than cost or security but despite this, efforts aren’t actually ruling out the risks of downtime. Here we look at how you can prevent downtown in your network or IT systems with some simple steps.

Why is avoiding downtown important?

Some 96 per cent of the respondents in the above study admitted to having experienced at least one incidence of their network going down over the past three years. Common causes include everything from human error and failures in infrastructure, to usage surges and network failures. However, around half of the IT departments questioned said their outages were preventable.

If outages do happen in your business, you can expect costs to include lost productivity, reduced revenue and compliance-related costs, among others. 

Here are our top tips to avoid outages:

Monitoring

Cloud computing can help you to apply close monitoring that can enable your IT department to identify issues that might lead to outages. This will usually involve an element of data forecasting.

Infrastructures can be comprehensively monitored using specific software. Make sure the tech you use is scalable and that it can be fully integrated into your current systems to allow it to work properly.

IT monitoring teams should focus on creating a high level of redundancy into their monitoring systems, which can help to prevent downtime. At the same time, they might look at identifying and fixing single points of failure which can lead to service outages on a regular basis. 

Security

Downtime is also a risk related to poor cybersecurity of course, and cyber attacks such as Denial of Service attacks will lead to network outages that can last for days or even weeks.

Ensuring you are investing in cybersecurity, such as managed firewalls and business continuity measures will help your business to minimise disruption in the case of a cyberattack.

Remember, if you are experiencing frequent service outages or network downtime, your business will be feeling the effects. For example, businesses who suffer with outages on a regular basis require nearly double the number of staff dedicated to troubleshooting and monitoring problem areas that can lead to outages. They also experience costs at 16 times those who do not have the same issues with downtime and power outages. 

In addition to the HR and financial costs, a business’s reputation will also feel the negative effects of regular outages, while the time spent on dealing with such issues is twice as long as for businesses that are outage-free.