Causes of Downtime and How to Minimize its Negative Impact

Posted by alvina on July 1st, 2017

One of the main ways to secureyour business so that it runs as smoothly as possible is to ensure you have a reliable disaster recovery plan in place. Downtime can cost your business not only time and money but also your reputation and customer loyalty.

What are the causes of downtime?

Downtime can be caused by many issues, however, the most common isplanned downtime which is a periodthatbusinesses take when they need to upgrade or maintain their systems. If you need to plan downtime it is important to inform your customers with plenty of notice and try to scheduleit for a quieter time whenpossible.

Unplanned downtime can be caused by a system crash, hardware failure and even faulty components. Other things that can cause unplanned downtime include data corruption and hacking. If this does occur you should inform your customers with regular updates using social media/email.

How does downtime affect businesses?

Depending on what type of business you have, the consequences of downtime can be more or less severe.Factors such as the time of downtime can also make a difference since business activities varyduring the day or night. The duration of the downtime can also have animpact on businesses, whether it's hard downtime, meaning the whole systemis down, or soft downtime, where the performance is only partially affected.

Website downtime can affect the profitability of the company due to no transactions being able to be made. It can also stop people from finding out more about your company and moving onto another one offering the same service or product. If the page is down you could lose the loyalty of customers, as well as their confidence in your company. New customers may opt for another provider that is currently available.

Creating a disaster recovery plan

One of the best ways to stop downtime from affecting your company is to keep your customers informed.However,with prevention being better than a cure, it’s a good idea to have a plan of action in place, such as disaster recovery solutions.

Using acloud based disaster recoverysystem will mean that, even if you are performing maintenance, you will be able to access copies of the system and data so that business can resume as normal. Should you lose everything, cloud systems will allow you to quickly replace lost and corrupted files.

Thankfully, crawlers that help to secure your position on search engines no longer use downtime as a means to select the position. Nonetheless,downtime can still force new and loyal customers to go elsewhere to get the service or product without having to wait for problems to be remedied.

Having a plan of action in place will help you to get back up and running a lot faster than it taking you by surprise. No matter how confident you are in your systems at present you don’t know when things will change, which is why you should always have a plan to implement in casethe worst happen.