Downtime occurs when a technology-related product or service is out-of-action and unavailable for use. This can either be planned – when upgrades and configurations are required, for example – or entirely unexpected due to systemwide failures, power outages, cyber security attacks, and more.
With an oft-cited statistic declaring that UK businesses could be losing an average of £3.6 million a year as a result – including 545 hours of wasted staff productivity – this impact is significant. And whether you’re an SME or blue-chip organisation, swallowing such spend is simply not an option in today’s uncertain economic climate.
The reality is, no organisation enjoys 100% uptime. But by developing a deep understanding of outage implications and how to minimise them, IT teams can build that all-important resilience to keep operations running as smoothly as possible. Our operations director, John Blackburn, explores this further…
Lost revenue: Whether it’s revenue lost in sales, paying out of pocket for recovery costs, or compensating unmet Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitments that have hindered business continuity elsewhere, a large part of the downtime sum will be related to direct finances. In the case of service outages, customers are unlikely to wait for the problem to be resolved and will instead be pushed towards competitors.
Tarnished reputation: Measuring intangible costs, such as business reputation, is a much more challenging assignment - and one that isn’t as easily reflected in numbers either. But that doesn’t make it any less severe. For customers, partners, and stakeholders alike, a network outage can significantly damage how much faith is placed in your service – particularly if you don’t react promptly, or the issue is ongoing. When Facebook suffered a global outage last year, the stock ended the day down nearly 5%!
Hindered productivity: Unplanned IT downtime can terminate work for an entire organisation for hours, and sometimes days, at a time. And for companies that rely on the public cloud for development efforts, as well as to communicate, the ability to do anything productive in this time comes to a complete standstill. For larger organisations paying a greater number of employee salaries, the impact is even greater.
How IT outsourcing can minimise risk
The first step to reducing the risk of IT downtime is through proactive monitoring and maintenance of the network. Instead of waiting for a problem to arise, or implementing a knee-jerk sticking plaster solution to cover the cracks, carry out a full health check of your tech stack. External IT partners can offer an invaluable service here, if you’d prefer not to eat up precious in-house resource.
A specialist third-party will not only advise where upgrades and repairs are required, but also take a proactive approach to ongoing upkeep – acting as an extension of your team to ensure systems are running efficiently in the background and enabling you to focus on more revenue-generating, value-add tasks. If you choose the best fit for your organisation, this relationship will be completely headache-free, and significantly minimise the cost of IT downtime.
If you’re keen to continue the conversation, why not get in touch for a no-obligation discussion? We’d love to chat through your requirements.
Central's cloud-to-cloud backup and point-in-time recovery solution allows firms to restore lost data quickly — minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity.
Microsoft 365’s recycle bin is NOT a backup solution. Don’t let limited retention policies put your data and compliance at risk. Get comprehensive backup and recovery of your Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Groups and Teams data with our cloud-to-cloud backup solution.
Although Microsoft will do their best to manage your data effectively, you ultimately remain responsible for the protection, backup and compliance of that data – and this is where Central can help.
We provide critical multi-layer security, archiving and backup for Microsoft 365 environments, allowing organisations to prepare and migrate safely, efficiently and economically.
With complete protection of email, data and cloud infrastructures, our clients have the peace of mind that their business and users are protected from dangerous cyberattacks, natural disasters and simple human error that can cause loss of business-critical data at any time.
Our cloud-to-cloud backup and point-in-time recovery solution enables you to restore lost data quickly and easily, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity. It provides fast, reliable recovery of Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint Online data in the event of malicious or accidental deletion. It also includes unlimited storage and retention, providing a predictable costing model to meet business requirements as your organisation grows.
Combining three proven cloud-based solutions that enhance Microsoft 365 deployments, we can swiftly and seamlessly add full-spectrum email security, compliance archiving and backup to any Microsoft 365 installation:
Email threat protection
Today’s IT professionals need an easy-to-manage and comprehensive email security solution that protects against phishing, malware, and ransomware. Along with multi-layer email security, our service provides email continuity and data loss prevention.
Advanced threat protection is also included which sandboxes suspicious email attachments and scans them for malware. Link protection redirects suspicious URLs, so malware is never inadvertently downloaded by recipients.
Archiving for Compliance
Our archiving service integrates with Microsoft 365 to create a cloud-based, indexed archive allowing granular retention policies, extensive search, auditing/permissions, legal hold and export helping to facilitate eDiscovery and retention.
Litigation holds preserve email from being tampered with until the litigation hold expires or is removed. Native and mobile apps provide intuitive interfaces that simplify search to ensure messages are found easily, even when email services are unavailable.
Backup and Recovery
While Microsoft 365 is a great option for companies wanting highly scalable and redundant architectures to mitigate natural and mechanical failures, there are inherent risks associated with cloud-hosted data, including human-caused data loss.
Our cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 solution protects Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint Online, as well as OneDrive files and folders, ensuring recovery in the event of accidental or malicious deletion.
