Downtime or time when your IT system is not functioning may not seem like a big deal. However, many business experience over an hour or downtime every week, something that is estimated to cost them over $1.2 billion per year. The truth of the matter is that IT downtime is costing your business money, and it needs to be minimised as much as possible. Fortunately, you will find out how to do this in the post below. 

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Plan for failures

 

Expecting success is all very well and good when it comes to setting goals. However, when you’re running a business reliant IT, it is also vital that you consider possible failures as well. In fact, by building in redundancies and safeguards into your system, you can better catch issues as they arise. Something that means they can be sorted before they even become a significant problem resulting in downtime. 

 

Think about your customers 

 

Downtime in the office can be frustrating and halt productivity. However, more severe is the downtime that customers experience when they cannot access your services online. In fact, it can result in customer attrition. Therefore, any customer-facing IT must be prioritized in the fight against downtime. 

 

Learn from mistakes 

 

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different result. In fact, this can be applied to the way your business deals with IT downtime as well. After all, if you have experienced an issue that leads to being offline for a significant amount of time, you would be crazy not to use that as a learning situation. Thus preventing it from happening in the future. 

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If you have a good IT department or outsourcer, they can use their experience dealing with other companies’ downtime issues and apply these to your system. Something that means you won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time and can learn from other people’s mistakes. 

 

Invest in proper equipment 

 

Next, when it comes to minimizing costly downtime in your business, you must invest in high-quality equipment. After all, you wouldn’t ask a carpenter to do their job with only one old, blunt chisel, now would you? 

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Of course, concerning IT, this means hardware, software, and data storage. In fact, locating a provider that offers data storage services that provide a safe, secure location with reliable servers, fast connections, and extensive bandwidth is essential. Otherwise, you could be setting your business up for a downtime issue later on. 

 

Invest in proper training 

 

Finally, when it comes to minimizing downtown in your business, employee training is essential. This is because so many of the issues responsible for downtime can be caused or spotted by people that are using the system every day. 

 

For example, but educating your employees on how to recognize a phishing scam, you can prevent hours of system downtime caused by this type of attack. In fact, ensuring everyone has a basic level of confidence using the IT software, hardware, and tools they are provided can make a massive difference to both security and productivity relating to downtime.