If it seems like the subject of downtime is trending almost every other week on social media, you’re probably not wrong. You may recall when Fastly, a major content delivery network, went down earlier this summer and caused outages for a wide range of websites, from CNN and The New York Times to Amazon and Target. A couple of years ago, Google had a software bug that was accidentally implemented to a larger number of servers than intended, turning off most of their servers. Not only did it take down Google services, like YouTube and Gmail, but it took down almost every service using Google Cloud. Then Cloudflare went down a few weeks later. And Facebook and Instagram experienced significant outages. One week later, it was Twitter. It’s alarming when almost every major social media network, and even sites like Google, experience significant downtime. It’s even more alarming when those outages affect your business.
HOW WOULD THE COST OF DOWNTIME AFFECT YOU DURING AN UNPLANNED OUTAGE?
Even an outage from a third party like Fastly has the potential to affect your uptime tremendously. Outages don’t just affect your employees, though, they affect your customers. The Cloudflare outage affected a staggering 9.9% of all websites on the internet by itself. Anyone using HubSpot, Discord, Coinbase, DigitalOcean, Asana, Yelp, Lyft, and about 2,600 more companies would have all experienced this downtime. According to a report published earlier this year by Veeam, the average cost of downtime is $84,650 per hour and the average downtime is 79 minutes. While lost revenue and time will significantly affect the bottom line for businesses of any size, the cost of downtime has added tangible costs, such as:- Lost customer confidence
- Lost employee confidence
- Damaged brand reputation
- Diverted resources from long-term strategic or business-critical projects
- Reduced stock prices
- Potential legal action
- Revoked licenses or accreditations
CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY SOLUTIONS CAN MITIGATE OUTAGE COSTS
In general, outages are fairly common, with about 23% of all servers experiencing at least one outage in 2020. The total costs from those lost sales, advertising, accounting, and number of employees and departments affected, quickly add up to hurt your company. There are proactive options your business can take to prepare for the possibility of unplanned downtime, and one of the easiest is to build in redundancy. Put simply, if one of your services fails, you will have another avenue to compensate and immediately fill in that gap. If your provider is already redundant, then you don’t need to worry as much. It might be difficult to know offhand if your partners are redundant, but that topic should be discussed at length in your service-level agreement (SLA). If Cloudflare had a recovery plan that could have been quickly implemented, like a disaster recovery system, then the downtime wouldn’t have affected their customers nearly as much. The need for modern data protection is essential to maintaining consistent business operations, and the cloud is playing an increasing role in disaster recovery and backup. Cloud-based data protection solutions offer a number of advantages, including:- Affordability: Pay for only the cloud services and features your business needs and reduce costs associated with physical hardware and onsite data centers.
- Reliability: Perform regular failover testing to evaluate your disaster recovery plan and address any issues you may find.
- Scalability: Build out your disaster recovery and backup solution as your business grows.
- Efficiency: If an unplanned outage or network failure does occur, data recovery can be quickly and effectively performed to minimize downtime.
- Security: Cloud platforms allow you to access multiple security options, such as multi-factor authentication, antivirus, anti-ransomware, endpoint detection, and more.
VIRTUAL SYSTEMS: CLOUD-BASED DISASTER RECOVERY AND BACKUP SOLUTIONS YOU CAN USE
It’s not only important to have the backups, but it’s also important to easily verify and prove the backups for compliance, business planning, and even insurance. Virtual System’s BaaS/DRaaS is built on Veeam and provides industry-leading verifiability. Understanding Veeam and how its features and capabilities can help your business reduce the cost of network downtime may feel complicated or overwhelming. Our team of experienced tech professionals would be happy to assist you. They love to chat with small business owners and other IT professionals. If you have questions or just want to know more, please reach out to our team. Keep in mind that Virtual Systems also is a VMware premium solution provider, and we offer service on top of the entire VMware Cloud infrastructure. This is an achievement that only 3% of all VMware partners accomplish. From Veeam to VMware and beyond, we can put our expertise to work for you. To learn more, call 844-2-VIRTUAL, email info@vsystems.com, or complete this short online form. References Russell, D. & Buffington, J. (n.d.) “2021 Data Protection Report.” Veeam. Retrieved from: https://www.veeam.com/wp-2021-data-protection-trends.html?ad=in-text-link Usage statistics and market share of Cloudflare. W3Techs. Retrieved from https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare Valinsky, J. & Goldman, D. (2021, June 8.) “Massive internet outage: Websites and apps around the world go dark.” CNN. Retrieved from: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/tech/internet-outage-fastly/index.htmlShare
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