Many organisations simply react to system failures.  When an IT failure occurs systems go down, operations stop and IT staff need to react with speed.  This downtime can have a huge impact on sales, critical operations, employee productivity, customer satisfaction levels and reputation.  Business critical systems must be available 24/7 – especially in today’s ‘always on’ world.

We worked with one of our clients to determine the financial loss to their business if their most critical IT systems suffered downtime.  At peak periods, they could lose £2,000 per minute if customers couldn’t access their services.  Clearly, this was something they wanted to address with some urgency.

Imagine you are the IT or operations manager of a food manufacturing company – keeping your production lines up and running is absolutely critical, particularly if you receive same day ordering from your customers.  If there is a problem with your IT systems then you’re not only losing money and time but there are limited shelf-life raw materials to contend with as well as frustrated customers without deliveries.  And that’s something Mr Supermarket Chain will not tolerate.

But the impact of system downtime isn’t just financial of course.  If you run a hospital department, for example, then round the clock system availability and fast patient information flow are vital to minimising queues and waiting times.  If you’re involved in education then you need fast access to the school’s administration system which provides pupil attendance records, lesson structures and parent contact information.

In these and other examples, the cost of downtime can be counted.  Increasingly organisations don’t just undertake downtime risk assessments but they make decisions to avoid it.

Do you know what your business critical systems are?  From email to electronic records, factory floors to trading floors, 999 call centres to emergency rooms, more and more organisations are looking to prevent system downtime, eliminate data loss and reduce operational costs.

There’s no need to compromise and accept ‘good enough’ system availability these days.  Even businesses with limited IT resources can benefit.  Proactive, prevention-based software systems are very affordable and ensure continuous business operation.  And that’s got to be more cost effective than reacting to system failures.

So put yourself in your customer’s shoes when they can’t access your service, receive deliveries or talk to your business.  You might be experiencing real system problems but, as customers, they don’t really care.  What they care about is what is happening to them.  And if this continues, how long do you think they’ll stay customers?

This blog post was inspired by an article by Nigel Dessau of Stratus Technologies – thank you Nigel.

“I decided to change from my previous backup provider for two reasons: the user screen was extremely technical to a non-techie person so it was very confusing.  Also, if I ever wanted to speak to an adviser, I was transferred through all the automated lines and eventually to someone in America!  The Replicate Data user screen is very easy to navigate and I know if I do need to speak to someone, it’s a real person in the UK and a direct number.”

If you want to know more about our off site data backup service then please get in touch.

Data backup is often one area of your business that is overlooked – “there’s too much to do so we’ll review it tomorrow”.  Yet with more staff working from home and operating online, a robust backup system should be an essential, not a ‘nice to have’.

Maybe you’ve already got backup tapes or staff putting memory sticks in their bags at night? Are you happy with the security implications?  And does this system work for you?  Can you restore your data?

Asking employees to back up data manually can be time consuming and a big responsibility/chore.

What happens to your business if:

• An employee leaves – how do you know they’ve backed up all data properly?
• Confidential business records are lost or stolen?
• Your external hard drive/tape drive fails?
• You damage your laptop or hard drive?  Even brand new equipment can be fragile.

An automated data backup solution can address all these issues.  Reduce the workload, responsiblity and stress – and know that in the event of human error or disaster, you can retrieve all your business critical data.

Limitations of protecting multi-core applications to the highest levels of fault tolerance were removed with everRun MX 6.0. Now the limits have been stretched again – with everRun MX 6.1, multi-core applications running on 8 x core Sandy Bridge processors are protected to the same levels of component and system fault tolerance.

No more power versus protection quandaries – enjoy both.

More and more manufacturers are adopting virtualisation software on the factory floor to consolidate servers and applications but that does create a critical computing environment.  Virtualisation doesn’t protect a server from failing.  However, adding in high availability options can prevent system downtime before it strikes.

Frank Hill, director of manufacturing business development at Stratus, explains how high availability options are easy to use, manage and maintain.  Read the full article in Manufacturing.net here

A: While uptime is important for all business applications, some are more worthy than others when it comes to high availability. Before examining availability options like fault-tolerant servers, clusters and high-availability software, companies must accurately calculate application value in terms of downtime cost. The majority of companies typically only factor in obvious costs, such as the wages of an idle workforce during that specific amount of time, but it goes beyond that. What about your reputation? Customers today demand constant access to goods and services – especially when they are hunting for specific deals and gifts. If they are unable to make a purchase, they’re likely to leave empty-handed (lost sale) and unhappy (they won’t keep that a secret, either).

A: Whether intentional or not, many retailers leave the door open to downtime despite investments to stop it. Typical approaches rely on rapid recovery from failure, after the damage is already done. The goal they should be concentrating on is downtime prevention. High-availability software and hardware solutions designed specifically to keep critical applications up and running in the event of component and system failures are readily available today. Retailers can get uptime-protection solutions sized to their requirements that are affordable and simple to use and manage. Regardless of a businesses’ size, prevention beats recovery every time.

Contact us to learn how we can prevent IT downtime in your business.

This is an excerpt of an interview with David Laurello, CEO of Stratus Technologies, in Virtual Strategy Magazine.  Click here to read the full article

A: Downtime can be planned, for patches or software upgrades, for example. Doing this any time of year can be disruptive, but doing it this time of year (Christmas peak time) should be avoided altogether. Unplanned downtime is the real threat. Quite simply, if your system is unexpectedly unavailable then you’re experiencing IT downtime. There can be any number of causes… software, hardware, network, human error. It’s a coin flip as to whether most downtime is caused by systems failure or human error; in our experience the two often go hand-in-hand. But, whether in-store or online, system outages drive away customers… empty-handed, frustrated and searching for better deals.

Industry analyst firms like Gartner, IDC, Aberdeen and others regularly release estimates of hourly downtime costs for the average company. Taking these various estimates into account, the average company can expect to be down more than 10 hours per year at a cost of $100,000 per hour.

Contact us to learn how we can prevent IT downtime in your business.

This is an excerpt of an interview with David Laurello, CEO of Stratus Technologies, in Virtual Strategy Magazine.  Click here to read the full article.

But that means all change for our web site!  We’ve started the switchover of branding and pages on our site and more information will be added as Stratus everRun collateral become available.  At the moment we’ve had to remove lots of the Marathon everRun video links because these are no longer available but hope to add replacements back in very soon.

In the meantime, if you have sales enquiries or need any further information please don’t hesitate to contact us.  We have specialised in providing consultancy, installation and support for everRun software since 2009 so our tech team has the expertise you need at their fingertips – let us help you keep your business up and running 24/7!

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