Tech Solutions To Reduce Business Downtime

Featured article by Richard Ross, Tech Expert

Reduced productivity is one of the main drawbacks of downtime. And in today’s highly competitive business environment characterized by 24x7x365 operation, uptime and round-the-clock service are crucial for your company’s success. Therefore, the last thing you want is the slightest business downtime; otherwise, your business won’t have an edge over its other competitors in the industry.

Different things cause downtime, including application failure, accidental deleting of data, and cyber attacks. Luckily, some tech solutions can help you minimize downtime, thereby safeguarding your company’s reputation and maintaining a positive customer experience. Read on to know about them.

1. Develop A Disaster Recovery Plan

Any business is susceptible to downtime; hence you need to be prepared when such a time comes. You can only do this by developing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that can give you step-by-step solutions to handle downtime. For further guidance on your recovery plan, you may acquire third-party services such as DRAAS. Such services can help you manage your business interruptions effectively and efficiently, guaranteeing business continuity.

2. Implementing A Preventative Maintenance Schedule

IT equipment such as workstations, servers, laptops, routers, switches, and printers, to name a few, are incredibly important in the day-to-day operations of running a business. Without these things running, employee productivity quickly reaches below minimum. And for this IT equipment to run smoothly, you must implement a preventative maintenance schedule. Doing this will help ensure your devices and systems last longer, protecting your business from unnecessary downtime. After all, prevention is better than cure, and this also applies to technology.

Routine preventative maintenance helps ensure that your IT equipment stays in good working order, saving you from the stress of dealing with IT issues. Doing this is necessary because improper care can lead to overheating of your hardware or technology, consequently causing downtime. Therefore, you need to have a preventative maintenance schedule as this effectively reduces the likelihood of downtime, data loss, or other negative impacts on your business. Thanks to this, you can focus on your business instead of your technology.

3. Routinely Update Your Applications And Hardware

Another tech solution that helps you minimize downtime is regularly updating your applications, hardware, and systems. Doing this will help maintain the security, stability, and health of your IT gadgets, and this proves enough why you must make updating the software and hardware a priority. Having the latest security features on your software and hardware gives you access to more streamlined operations and capabilities. In addition, it helps do away with any bugs that can cause costly downtime.

4. Regularly Back Up Your Data And System

The best way to prevent files from being deleted—accidentally or intentionally—is to regularly back up your data and system, thereby preventing prolonged downtime. As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to protect the privacy and security of everyone involved in your business, including your clients. And with the heightened frequency of cyberattacks, you should prioritize this.

Therefore, it’s better to take a proactive and cautious approach to save yourself from suffering the loss of business and the stress of the incident going public. At the end of the day, you don’t want to lose everything your business has worked so hard to create. You can do this using redundant hardware for critical servers, implementing a business continuity plan, and keeping copies of your data offsite.

5. Constantly Monitor Your Systems And Hardware

When your systems go down, so does your productivity, and this unplanned downtime can cost your business thousands of dollars each day. This is why you should be proactive and prevent system failure before it happens by constantly observing and assessing. Doing this will enable you to identify a possible issue before it causes downtime.

You should make the monitoring and assessment of your systems and hardware a priority, no matter the size of your business. This ensures you at all times have complete visibility into your system’s performance and is a cost-effective way to reduce downtime. Other monitoring practices you should consider adopting include;

– Closely monitoring metrics such as saturation, traffic, errors, and latency.
– Using a monitoring software application, for example, Prometheus and Graphite, to help with observing your systems.
– Routinely checking devices such as firewalls, workstations, and switches to ensure they’re in perfect working condition.

Constantly monitoring your networks and systems adds an extra layer of protection by identifying and resolving any issue that can lead to a system crash, which causes downtime.

6. Buy Reliable Equipment

You can further protect your business from downtime by investing in IT and hardware solutions with high-quality processing, thereby handling your workload efficiently. To keep your business running smoothly, you must do this for all the technological gadgets you buy, be it new laptops and PCs, printers, monitors, telephones, and more. While you’ll undoubtedly have to dig deeper into your pocket for high-quality equipment, this can save you more money from repairs and malfunctions.

7. Train Your Employees On How Best To Best Use The Company’s Technology Systems And Networks

Employees are the backbone of your business. Because of this, they need to be trained on the proper use of technology to prevent any human error that results in downtime and lost productivity. The training needs to be robust and comprehensive, teaching your employees updated cybersecurity threats. This includes ransomware, malware, phishing attacks, as well as observing the standard IT policies and procedures. Making use of training management software can help you with this.

The importance of training shouldn’t be ignored because keeping your employees current with the latest technological advances is often a challenge. Training your staff also helps them acquire technological skills to better maintain the systems on their own. This will reduce the amount of time your tech employees spend fixing personal computers and other gadgets, possible downtime, and overall improved productivity in your company.

Takeaway

Effectively reducing downtime can prove to be the difference between the survival or collapse of your business. Therefore, this is something that you must never take lightly. And to ensure smooth company operations, this detailed guide has outlined tech solutions you should adopt to minimize downtime. Implementing these solutions will go a long way in shielding your business from the many negative consequences that arise due to business downtime.

Richard Ross

Richard Ross is a tech expert with over 10 years of experience in the industry. Richard loves sharing his knowledge and expertise on technological matters through guest posts and blogs. He loves spending his free time catching up with friends and family, cooking, hiking, and boating.