Avoid Business Downtime: Prevention Strategies That Work

Having a business continuity plan is important, as no business wants to experience downtime. However, if you face an unexpected outage, it will heavily impact your bottom line. These might range from hardware failure to cyberattacks.

The worst part is that it stops your business operations. This way, it affects your customers’ trust. Apart from that, you have to deal with time and money constraints. Since your customers always expect your business to be available, you must take necessary steps to deal with downtime.

Therefore, read on to get a better idea of how to build a business continuity plan to deal with downtime.

The Real Cost Of Downtime: Why Must You Take It Seriously?

In general, when you face system failure, your productivity and operations (or parts of them) come to a halt. This is because your employees lose access to data and tools that they must have to do their job. As a result, customers lose trust in your business. Also, multiple delays frustrate them a lot.

For revenue-generating systems like e-commerce platforms, even a few hours offline result in thousands of lost sales.

There’s also the cost of recovery that needs to be added to the equation. IT teams working overtime, emergency vendor support, potential reputational damage if the outage becomes public – all these add to the expenses bill. Gartner reported that the average cost of IT downtime is a substantial $5,600 per minute.

All this highlights why prevention is a financial necessity.

5 Proven Downtime Prevention Strategies

The following are some of the major strategies with the help of which you will be able to prevent your business downtime:

1. Perform Regular System Maintenance

Failure levels increase significantly with outdated hardware, neglected patches, and legacy software. That’s why it’s highly recommended that you establish a consistent maintenance schedule to keep systems up to date.

Routine health checks on servers and endpoints support the identification of potential weak spots before they become issues.

2. Implement Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Interestingly, one of the major causes of unplanned downtime is cyberattacks. In general, these come in the form of malware.

With MDR, you can instantly reduce the risk of attacks. Basically, MDR provides you with 24/7 monitoring and threat detection. Meanwhile, a team of cybersecurity experts ensures a fast response to attacks.

As you implement MDR, your security system always notices attacks. Hence, this aspect enables them to deal with threats. This way, you will ensure that those threats do not escalate to an outage. Otherwise, your business systems will suffer.

3. Develop a Redundant Infrastructure

If you want to make your business resilient, you have to focus on redundancy. For instance, if one part of your business goes offline, your operations will continue without any issue. This is possible if you implement cloud-based backups and failover systems.

However, if you have to operate critical systems, you must implement high-availability configurations. Hence, if a failure happens, it will automatically switch to the backup environment.

4. Always Document and Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Obviously, a disaster recovery plan is critical for your business. However, merely a disaster recovery plan is not enough.

In fact, it must be regularly tested and updated. To ensure employees know their roles and response steps, it’s wise to simulate different downtime scenarios. This minimizes confusion during a real incident.

5. Monitor Business Performance in Real Time

It is important to track your system performance and availability from time to time. Hence, you have to learn how to utilize monitoring tools. To start with, you must look at early warning signs. These include network latency and CPU spikes. This way, you will be able to identify the problems before they lead to bigger issues.

Apart from that, you must also work with a system that generates automated alerts. Thereby, you will be able to respond faster and minimize downtime.

How To Develop A Business Continuity Plan? – Essential Steps

The following are the major steps you must take if you want to develop a business continuity plan to deal with outages:

1. Identify Your Risks

It does not matter what the size and structure of your business is. You must always identify your business risks. This will enable you to deal with it better. Start by listing all the potential threats to your business. Thereby, you will know how to eliminate them effectively.

2. Analyze Your Business Impact

If you want your business continuity plan to work, you have to perform a business impact analysis. This will help you to deal with lost revenues, regulatory issues, and other aspects. Moreover, depending on your business impact analysis, you will be able to determine the downtime that your business can tolerate.

3. Determine Your Critical Systems

As you identify the potential risks and impacts on your business, you will be able to develop critical systems and functions. This way, you will be able to prioritize your systems for recovery and protection.

4. Backup Your Data

With your risk assessment and business impact analysis, you will get a better idea of what backup strategy you will have to follow. Moreover, make sure your data backup solution adheres to Arcserve’s 3-2-1-1 backup rule.

5. Test Your Continuity Plan from Time to Time

After you implement your business continuity plan, make sure to test it from time to time. This way, you will be able to ensure it works when a disaster strikes unexpectedly. Apart from that, ensure to hire experts to test your plan independently.

Protect Your Business Now

If you want to deal with business downtime, you will have to develop a business continuity plan. Hence, you must move with an optimistic and layered approach. This way, you will be able to combine technological developments with operational discipline.

Apart from that, every strategy you come up with will protect your uptime. This includes routine maintenance and advanced threat protection. In today’s business environment, every minute counts. Hence, it is critical to protect your business from unnecessary outages.

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