3 Ways Your Business Can Avoid or Minimize the Impact of Downtime

The phrase “time is money” is something that you hear a lot, especially in the business environment. While this might be applied in small ways, such as employees taking one or two minutes longer on their breaks or leaving early for the day, the major issue with wasted time manifests itself in much larger and more unpredictable ways. The true silent killer of businesses is downtime, and you need to be aware of its impact on your organization on a holistic level.

What is Downtime?

Downtime is notorious for being a business killer, but it’s easier to run into downtime-related issues than you might think. In reality, downtime occurs any time your business is not operating as intended for any reason. This includes issues like your Internet going down, your technology not working properly, your employees not having access to important resources, etc. The important thing to know about downtime is that it means your business is not being as effective as it could be, meaning wasted profits and resources, all of which can add up over time.

Here are some ways that you can mitigate downtime and decrease the odds of it impacting your business in a significant way.

Plan for the Worst

It is a difficult conversation to have, but you need to prioritize business continuity and ensure that operations can continue even under the worst of circumstances. This involves implementing a data backup and disaster recovery system that is capable of minimizing downtime. When implementing this, you should consider how much time it takes for your organization to get back to proper working order and plan that into your budget. In other words, you are budgeting for an acceptable loss of operations; this prevents you from being caught unawares when it does inevitably come to fruition.

Streamline Operations

A lot of time is wasted when employees do not know what exactly needs to be done or how to do it. Therefore, streamlining operations and tasks makes a lot of sense from a downtime perspective. If an employee wastes half an hour trying to find documents in your document management system, that is half an hour that isn’t being spent getting things done. You can implement various technology solutions that can document processes and files in an easy-to-find place, allowing your employees to locate them as needed without any hassle. Better yet, you can automate certain processes to take some of the guesswork out of their day-to-day tasks (like with your data backup solution, for example).

Take Care of Your Technology

Imagine working on a project and making a ton of great progress on it only to be disrupted by a major downtime event, like a software solution crashing or your laptop freezing up out of nowhere. These small issues can take you out of that flow state that is so great for productivity, leading to time wasted while you refocus on the task at hand—and that’s assuming that your technology only has a minor hiccup and not a major technical failure! Administering the proper patches and maintenance in a proactive way is the best way to make sure that your technology does not bring about major downtime events.

Washington Works can help your organization leverage technology to its benefit to reduce downtime, improve accessibility, and minimize the odds of hardware failures. To learn more about what we can do for your business, reach out to us at 301-571-5040.