How the Average Business Can Reduce Downtime the Easy Way

Any time your company isn’t doing business, you’re losing money. Downtime is expensive. Production delays impact profit margin. The cost of lost opportunity can be high. And that’s before considering the toll downtime can take on your company’s reputation and ability to serve customers. Trouble is, many businesses aren’t taking steps that help reduce downtime. In this piece, we’ll take a peek at the costs and causes of downtime. We’ll also look at how one simple solution can save your business thousands.

What Does Downtime Cost Me?

According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is about $5,600 per minute based on various surveys. While a formula for finding your downtime cost is more than we have space for here, it’s easy to imagine how quickly loss of productivity can impact your bottom line. Paying people who can’t be fully productive is a cost in and of itself, and that’s before you add things like impact to reputation and brand image. No matter how you look at it, reducing or eliminating downtime can save you a lot of money. With that in mind, what are the main causes, and what can you do about them?

DR, Backup, and the Death of Downtime

For most businesses, a power outage or equipment failure is what comes to mind when you think of downtime events. The fact is, power outages and storms aren’t as common as network outages. Where would your team be without access to email? What about the apps they depend on to get their work done? You may not be able to prepare for every type of network outage, but there’s a lot you can do to prepare for common issues, and it all starts with a good backup. A backup is a copy of the information stored on your desktops, servers, and so on. By itself, it’s a great way to prevent data loss. If you suddenly lost some of your most critical data (client info, core operational documents), you can imagine how tough it would be to get back on your feet. Backups prevent crippling data loss. When you take a step beyond backup, you get disaster recovery (DR). A DR strategy is designed to ensure that not only is data safe, it’s also quickly accessible in the event of an outage. For most businesses, disaster recovery is about ensuring that you always have a way to access applications, data, and everything your team needs to be successful.

How Do I Make DR Easy?

Many companies have backups, but few invest in DR. The ones that do often have a patchwork of technologies that work together to keep data safe and recoverable. But because of the complexity, they can be tough to manage and may not be reliable. Plus, they rarely offer flexible recovery options that help businesses get back to work quickly. Some are complex enough to require a full-time staff member just to keep it all running smoothly. Challenges like these are why many small businesses are thinking inside the box.

Appliance-Based Backup and DR

Appliance-based backup and DR solutions have every feature a small business needs to keep data safe and recoverable, all inside one piece of physical hardware. Backup policies, storage, and recovery options are easy to access from a dashboard. Users plug it in, log into a dashboard, then get control over which systems get backed up as well as how, when, and where they get backed up. If something goes wrong, you can restore a file or folder—or even an entire system—with just a few clicks. Many businesses are using appliances for backup and DR because they offer such a simple way to give them the data protection and flexible recovery options they need.

Conclusion

DR can seem complicated. But with the right tools, it’s easy. Using a plug-and-play box, and one cloud-based app to control everything, you can worry less about backup and downtime and more about making the most of your abundant uptime.