words Al Woods
Throughout North America alone, outages cost around $650 billion per year. This is more than the GDP of some places. Many organizations report that they experience around five downtime events on a monthly basis.
The above numbers represent lost productivity and revenue. This means businesses can lost much more than revenue and productivity as a result of experiencing outages. Network downtime can cause a tremendous amount of damage to a business’s reputation, see them hit with compliance penalties and many other issues that can lead to businesses paying out even larger sums of money.
In a perfect world, you’ll stop outages before they ever occur. The good news is you can reduce risk of downtime. Here are four things to keep an eye out for that can help you do just that.
1. Network Redundancies– Network problems do happen, and this can be due to an array of things such as a weather event, hardware failure or a power outage to name a few. Having a backup plan can go a long way in preventing downtime. Network redundancy is all about ensuring there are several data paths between network locations, which means alternate paths are available if one fails. Also, it’s a good idea to have a backup power supply.
2. Fiber Internet- Companies should consider fiber optic networks if they are seeking connectivity that is fast and reliable. Fiber is far sturdier than copper wiring and it does a good job withstanding temperature fluctuations and it isn’t sensitive to moisture. Both of those can cause issues with connectivity.
Fiber is also not sensitive to radio signals or electronic signals. Besides that, fiber internet provides speeds up to 10 Gbps or more. As a result, productivity losses will be far and few between, which isn’t the case with copper wires. Ensure devices are always charged with a long lasting portable charger.
3. Security- Sometimes outages are due to other issues, such as DDoS attacks. In fact, these account for around one in five unexpected outages. It is crucial to be up-to-date with the latest cyber-security threats. Monitoring your network security constantly can increase your chances of finding and stopping threats quickly.
4. SLA- SLA is short for service-level agreement. It’s not a tool that can prevent outages or anything like that. However, it can provide you insights into how reliable your service provider is.
You want to choose a vendor that has a high percentage of up-time. Ideally, they should guarantee up-time of 99% or higher. If an outage happens, then your provider might look at it as their own emergency to deal with. In turn, they may do things to mitigate losses.
Take a look at your SLA. Look for things that discusses timelines in regards to responding to issues. You might want to consider including monetary penalties if your vendor didn’t adhere to the standards they agreed to. This can help you mitigate losses and/or be better prepared to deal with an outage.
