Network Downtime to Prevent Costly Outages

 Your network is probably the least visible piece of your infrastructure, but network outages can cause highly visible problems for your business. In one study, 90 percent of businesses had at least one network outage during the past year, with many experiencing two or more.


The costs of those outages are high. It’s hard to pin them down exactly, but some estimates have them running over $9,000 every minute the systems are down. With more than half of outages lasting over an hour, that’s a significant cost. And the cost of the outage can linger even after systems are back up, due to overtime needed to catch up on the work delayed during the outage, the need to pay for expedited shipping to fulfill orders, damage to your company’s reputation, and loss of customer trust and future business.

Address the Causes of Downtime
Most of that downtime is due to equipment failures, followed by human errors. Reducing downtime and its associated costs requires addressing both the technical and people issues.

The equipment failures can be addressed by building in redundancy to your network. Having spare equipment on hand is highly effective in preventing and minimizing downtime, particularly if you have automated scripts to bring backups on line and failover as needed when problems are detected. Although cyberattacks cause only a small portion of outages, you should implement the appropriate software tools (firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion detection systems) to guard against them.

The human failures can largely be addressed by training. Estimates claim that 60 to 80 percent of unplanned outages come from incorrect configuration changes, so making sure your staff is fully trained in your equipment and software is very important. While manual review isn’t foolproof, you should have a process that requires a second person to approve sensitive changes to network and device settings. More generally, staff should also be trained to recognize phishing attempts and

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