In the world of digital where everything is going easy for the consumer, the nightmare has come upon businesses to ensure 100 percent efficiency and uptime. Application downtime can cost companies millions in some cases. In such a scenario, how do companies ensure that the systems are up all time, and how do they overcome downtime?“Some of the most common causes of downtime are inadequate maintenance,” Mayank Bhargava, CIO, Primerica Life Insurance said. “Servers like any other machine require maintenance, they require scheduled downtime so we don’t have unscheduled downtime. But at times this becomes difficult for a business to get because everybody wants things to be running at all points of time. The servers may go down if we are not able to carry out the scheduled maintenance,”
Technology disruptions cannot be entirely eliminated; however, they can be significantly mitigated by effectively implementing preventive and corrective resilience arrangements.
“In today’s highly competitive customer-centric environment, service outages can quite easily shake consumer confidence, tarnish the market reputation and in some cases invite regulatory scrutiny. It has thus become increasingly pertinent to look beyond the dollarized downtime impact of a server outage and focus organization’s efforts in building a holistic technology resilience program,” said Vishal Jain, Partner, Deloitte India.
Regular maintenance, cybersecurity, and adopting the latest technologies is something that’s equally important to keep your servers running uninterrupted, according to Bhargava.
“Regular maintenance of servers helps in avoiding unscheduled downtime and outage. Along with maintenance, it is necessary to keep your systems updated on the latest software and antivirus patches. On the other hand, cyber attacks may be out of your control, but it is important to give adequate attention to your organization’s cybersecurity to filter out unwanted traffic, so you can work on minimizing the threat of cyber attacks.”
Last but not the least, Bhargava suggested keeping yourself updated and aware of what’s happening, what are the technologies that are available to keep you abreast on anything new that might be of use and can be brought in on your own setup.
Further Vishal suggests that a thorough risk and impact assessment of the technology infrastructure enables an organization to identify single points of failures and also assign criticality to the underlying system components.
“The effectiveness of this exercise is highly critical as it provides the insights necessary for planning the resilience infrastructure required to continue operations in the event of a disruption affecting the primary site. In addition to the traditional resilience arrangements, many organisations have been leveraging the capability of cloud to further enhance their technology resilience posture,” Jain explained.
Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are proving to be a game-changer in every sector and industry. The same technologies can also be used to fight data outages and downtime. Sunil Peter – Head IT SecOps & CISO, Maveric Systems helps us understand how we can do so.
“We can overcome system downtime by setting up automated failover, back-up, replication & restoration mechanisms across the network & server infrastructure, implement continuous health monitoring for all core infrastructure assets, configure dashboard with real-time alerts for threshold monitoring thereby paving way for timely preventive maintenance, automate critical patching process by building AI, ML-based automation and orchestration security infrastructure to significantly reduce the chance of system failures and security breaches,” Peter said.
There are many dimensions to the after-effects of server downtime, the most necessary ones being the direct impact that affects the customers and business opportunities, but there is also the indirect impact of the downtime, i.e., the effect on employee productivity due to unavailability of internal servers. Server downtime can also have a diverse impact on the reputation of the organization. Being able to achieve a complete uptime could be a dream, but the reality is to make that dream come true in order to survive in uncertain times.
(With additional inputs from Dhrumil Dhakan)
