Yearly Archives: 2019

Today’s offices are dependent upon multiple different connections to keep them running. From their wireless network to cloud-based task management apps, if just one of those vital services goes offline, it can mean costly system downtime. For example, the project management application Asana went down earlier this year, leaving the over 50K businesses that depend upon the app at a standstill on their projects and tasks for several hours. As bad as it is to have a cloud provider go offline, things can get much worse when it’s your own internal IT infrastructure that goes down. When you have a crashed server or network that’s been hit with ransomware, it can mean hours or days of lost business and other costly consequences.  Avoiding downtime is a key objective of using a managed IT service plan. Technology has become so ingrained in everything a company does, that keeping that infrastructure healthy keeps your business healthy as well. Major Causes of Downtime Unfortunately, downtime can come at you from multiple places. Unless you’re monitoring all your systems for warning signs and have a solid plan in place to recover quickly from a natural disaster or data breach, extended downtime is almost inevitable at some point. Major causes of downtime for companies include: Network outages Human error Server failures Power outages Application errors Natural disasters/weather events Cyberattack/data breach Malware/ransomware Third-party/cloud system outage Storage failures The Consequences of System Downtime Downtime impacts companies in multiple ways, all of them bad. Losses can also be spread out well past a major downtime event, plaguing a company for years afterwards. According to IBM Security’s 2019 “Cost of a Data Breach Report,” the longtail costs of downtime due to a data breach are spread out past 2 years, with: 67% of the costs in year 1 22% of the […]