Maintenance is More than Computer Repair

When you think of downtime, you probably think about the power or your Internet connection going out and leaving you unable to do work. Unfortunately, these are anecdotes that seem benign, but are actually extraordinarily costly. When interruptions to your business’ computing infrastructure are constantly hindering productivity, you need to come up with a solution.

Technology-Induced Downtime

The way your technology functions is extremely important to reducing the amount of downtime your organization suffers. When your network and applications unexpectedly fail and crash, you will see substantial dips in productivity, a metric that is hard to quantify.

The best way to explain this is to look at how downtime affects large companies. According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime in the enterprise sector is about $5,600 per minute. In fact, 98-percent of enterprises say that an hour of operational downtime can cost well over $100,000. 

Now, as a small business owner, you may be thinking that downtime is bad, but at least we don’t see that type of loss…Well, think again. Percentage of loss is right in line all the way down to mom-and-pop businesses. If you were to have an hour of operational downtime because a server component fails, you are looking at a massive loss. Sometimes, these losses are fatal for businesses that are unprepared. 

Other Problems

The largest problem with downtime of any kind is the money you are spending to get nothing out of it. No other place is this more evident than having situational downtime that affects a number of your employees. Say one workstation fails in your office and it results in one person troubleshooting problems with a break/fix or onsite IT administrator. Not only are you getting nothing from the employee, you are also paying the technician a premium rate to support that piece of technology. If you think about it, one failed computer in the peak productivity hours of the workday will cost you at least hundreds if not thousands of dollars. 

Then you have to consider: what if that were my server?

You quickly will understand that it is completely untenable to not do what you can to avoid large swaths of downtime inside your business. 

What You Can Do

There are a few things you can do to actively fight downtime. They include:

Proactively Maintain Your Technology

The best thing that you can do for your business’ technology is to get a managed services provider to actively monitor and maintain all of your network-attached hardware. With state-of-the-art technology, an MSP can not only see how all of your technology is functioning, it can typically fix issues these systems have before they can become downtime-inducing problems. 

Keep Your Software Updated

Malware is a big problem for any business. As such, there needs to be an ongoing policy that keeps all network-attached software updated and patched for security vulnerabilities. An exploit of any holes in your software can turn into major downtime and even worse, so keeping software updated has to be a priority. 

Isolate Problems

One of the best ways to keep downtime to a minimum is to use technology services to do so. A comprehensive help desk offering can keep downtime to a minimum by giving employees direct access to tech support. Most times the help desk technician can help resolve issues in minutes, and even if they can’t they can expedite situations to the proper maintenance channels.

Comprehensive Backup

Finally, every business that utilizes information technology to their advantage needs to protect the data and infrastructure by having a comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery platform. The BDR backs up data in-house, and in the cloud to give organizations the peace of mind that no matter what happens, their data is safe. 

If you own a business, limiting downtime is a priority. If you would like to learn how Washington Works helps minimize downtime, give us a call today at 301-571-5040.