In an always-on world, many businesses never sleep and operate or provide services round-the-clock. For some, continuous service delivery is the reason for customer loyalty. However for any business, uptime and availability of critical resources play an influential role in determining the success of an organization. To ensure business continuity, organizations must overcome unique challenges every day. One of these challenges is downtime.
Downtime is disruptive, costly and unacceptable in today’s competitive business landscape. Downtime can happen for several reasons, ranging from accidental data deletion to application failure to advanced cyberattacks. Without a robust BCDR solution in place, an unplanned downtime event can result in costly consequences and tarnish your brand’s reputation.
What Does Downtime Mean in Business?
Downtime is a period during which production or business processes come to a halt due to application unavailability, technical glitch, network outage or natural disaster. During downtime, a computer system, server or network is offline or unavailable, and employees are involuntarily unproductive — unable to conduct business or service clients. Without a comprehensive business continuity plan, downtime can potentially paralyze your organization, and in some cases, even cause irreparable damage.
⇨ Types of Downtime ⇦
Downtime can broadly be classified into planned downtime and unplanned downtime.
⇨ Planned Downtime ⇦
This is where NTP maintenance service comes into play.
Planned downtime is scheduled and anticipated in advance and may typically be carried out during holidays, weekends or after working hours. This ensures normal business operations are uninterrupted and employee productivity is unaffected. Planned downtime can be for routine maintenance or inspection, hardware/software upgrades, repairs or testing.
Since planned downtime is intentional and controlled, it doesn’t have any negative impact on business when done right. Planned downtime is essential to ensure systems, applications and servers are up to date and functioning at optimal capacity. During scheduled downtime, IT professionals can also run tests to identify potential threats and fix them before they turn into real problems.
What Are IT Maintenance Services?
IT maintenance services is a blanket term that includes complete software and hardware maintenance support for your business computer system. That means making a complete record of all hardware and software that must be maintained for the system to function properly and optimally. In addition, you must take responsibility for performing any maintenance tasks the system requires to meet that goal.
Why Do I Need IT Maintenance Services?
Keeping a whole business’ IT system — both software and hardware — running smoothly is a big task, even if you are a relatively small company. If you run a large company, it can seem completely overwhelming. One solution, of course, is to hire in-house IT staff. However, this can become extremely expensive, especially in larger companies, and even IT staff can become overwhelmed if enough issues arrive. In addition, there is a shortage of qualified IT personnel in our country.
When you hire a dedicated IT maintenance support company like NTP to handle your software and hardware maintenance, you shift the enormous burden of making sure your IT is working properly off your plate and onto ours, so you can concentrate on the performance of your current business. You don’t have to worry about what might happen wrong with your IT system. You will know we are monitoring everything and will take care of any problems as they arise. However, if you are looking for instant help 24x7x365, better have a look at our support offers below.
⇨ Unplanned Downtime ⇦
Unplanned downtime, on the other hand, is unintentional, unanticipated and can occur at any time. This can be due to several reasons, including hardware or software failure, human error, malicious attacks or natural disasters. Since unplanned downtime is unexpected and occurs without warning, preventing it can be a challenge. Regardless of its causes, unplanned downtime can bring your business to a grinding halt. However, by implementing a well-established business continuity plan, you can minimize the impact of downtime to a large extent.
What Are the Causes of Downtime?
There are several causes of downtime. Some of the main causes are explained below:
Human Error: Whether accidental or due to negligence, human error is one of the most common causes of unplanned downtime. An employee unintentionally deleting data or accidentally unplugging a cable or not following standard protocols can lead to costly downtime. Human error is unavoidable but with regular training and having a well-documented IT checklist or policies, its frequency can be reduced.
Hardware/Software Failure: Obsolete hardware or software increases the chances of application failure and system outages. Outdated hardware and software also result in inefficient performance, which can have a significant impact on productivity. If patches are applied without proper testing, they can corrupt the entire application.
Device Misconfiguration: Device misconfiguration is another major cause of unplanned downtime. Configuration errors can create security gaps in your network, making it vulnerable to cyberattacks. To avoid misconfiguration errors, you can automate the process instead of setting the parameters manually. Test the configurations in a lab setting before implementing the changes to your system.
Bugs: Bugs in a server’s operating system can impact its performance as well as lead to security issues. If patches aren’t applied on time or applied without appropriate testing, they can corrupt applications and lead to server failure.
Cybersecurity Threats: Cyberthreats, including sophisticated ransomware and phishing attacks, are one of the most dangerous and common causes of IT downtime, and can bring your organization to a standstill. Malicious actors can easily exploit vulnerabilities in your network, infiltrate systems and gain access to confidential data. Employee training and implementing security solutions, such as spam filters, multifactor authentication and file encryption, can contribute a long way towards overcoming cybersecurity challenges.
Natural Disasters: Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes, can disrupt power supply and communication or even damage hardware. This can have catastrophic consequences for your business if downtime extends for a prolonged period.
Downtime Costs
Downtime costs can vary depending on the size and nature of your business as well as the duration of downtime.
Downtime Cost Calculator
Knowing the cost of downtime will help you evaluate its impact on your business. Use the downtime calculator or follow the directions to calculate the true cost of downtime.
You can also use these formulas to estimate lost productivity in the event of downtime.
Lost Productivity = (no. of users affected) x (effect on productivity [in percentage]) x (avg. salary per hour) x (duration of downtime)
or
Lost Productivity = (no. of users affected) x (effect on productivity [in percentage]) x (avg. profit per employee) x (duration of downtime)
or
Lost Productivity = (no. of transactions per hour) x (percentage of affected transactions) x (avg. profit per transaction) x (duration of downtime)
Other Costs and Effects of Downtime
Apart from financial losses, there are other consequences of downtime that organizations must deal with if unprepared. Depending on the frequency and extent of downtime, it can have both short- and long-term effects on your business. Listed below are some of the major consequences of downtime.
Lost Productivity: When downtime due to equipment failure or network outage occurs, mission-critical systems become unavailable for use. Without essential applications, systems and network services, employees wouldn’t be able to do their work. As such, employees are involuntarily idle. The length of an unproductive period depends on the duration of the downtime.
Lost Business Opportunities: In today’s interconnected digital world where businesses rely heavily on application uptime and availability, a moment of downtime can leave a negative impact on your business. Downtime can result in poor experiences, including your customers being unable to access your products or services. In addition, your employees are unable to support them since the necessary tools are out of order. Such instances can easily drive away existing clients as well as prospects.
Damaged Brand Image: In this fast-paced business landscape, customers expect a quick, seamless experience every time. Delays are intolerable and downtime is unacceptable. In such a scenario, a single downtime event can put your organization’s reliability and reputation at risk. Repeated downtime events can result in unhappy customers, which can quickly translate into dissatisfied customer reviews and a tarnished brand image.
Data Loss: Downtime affects not only your business but your clients as well. Downtime due to cyberattacks, server or network outages can result in corrupted, damaged or stolen data. Unexpected downtime, such as a server outage, can potentially expose your valuable data or create security gaps, which cybercriminals can exploit to gain unauthorized access.
Downtime Monitoring and Prevention
It is unpredictable and can happen to any organization, irrespective of its size. In the process of planning any project, we always develop disaster recovery plans and implement BCDR (Business continuity and disaster recovery) to minimise downtime impact on business.
But what if you don’t have BCDR, you are already in the process of updating your existing infrastructure, network and applications? Or, you are not yet aware of what you should do or how you can maximise prevention?
If you don't have a proper BCDR in place, there is a possibility of unexpected downtime. Do you know what to do if something goes horribly wrong? How can you keep your finger on the pulse 24/7? How long can you afford to be without your systems before it starts to affect your customers and therefore your business?
This is where NTP's support and maintenance service comes into play.
You might know how to work with your company’s systems, but you will need our support and maintenance services that can reduce downtime risks, so that you can ensure your devices are up to date, test backups regularly, and constantly monitor your network and devices. Most connectivity problems can be fixed quickly by technical experts over the phone. Many can even be prevented before they occur through proactive monitoring.
Even if you are using software that comes with customer support, it can't help to have a local speaking dedicated IT support team on-hand that is familiar with your existing infrastructure and systems. They may be able to fix the issue for you faster than you can contact your software provider’s support team.
A professional IT support team like us can analyse most technical problems and deliver highly skilled solutions.
Data Storage - Human Error
NTP IT Support team's role is to make sure, in case of human error, your data is not deleted and, in case of attack, is stored in a secure environment and make sure it is easily accessible but only to the people that are allowed to view it. Without the support of a professional IT team, you could end up storing data in a vulnerable location. Or giving access to somebody without the right permission. This can be a big issue where data protection is concerned. In case of application, hardware or software failure, natural disaster or security misconfiguration, it is most critical to fix the issue asap. This will ensure that your business continues to operate without failure.
Responsiveness - Is determined by an SLA (Service Level Agreement), so that you can have a guaranteed response time.
Knowledge - Using junior-to-senior-to-architect level escalation of technical departments, we can handle any technical task of any complexity.
Cost - By providing a suitable engineer according to the complexity of our customer's task, our company optimises both our resources and our customer's cost. Depending on the complexity of your requirements, the price of the service is commensurate with the quality.
Flexibility - Long contracts may sound apathetic to our customers, especially to those who have never used our services before. In order to show customers the value of our services, we offer three-month, six-month, one-year and two-year contracts, and also provide the same pricing formulation per month for the same volume of SLA's as our three-month contract and two-year contract.