As a business owner, regardless if it’s a small business or a large corporation, one factor that is crucial to your business operations is uptime. Make sure that your website, applications, and customer service systems are working all the time. Downtime can be a nightmare for both customers and employees leading to loss in trust, productivity and revenue.
What steps should you take to ensure that your network and servers run 24 hours a day without interruptions? That is where seamless NOC Services help you out. Let’s have a look on the tips and strategies that will help bolster your IT infrastructure.
-
Understand Uptime and why is it so crucial for your business
Before we discuss how to maintain uptime, let’s explain what it is. In this fast pace digital world, a single disruption can have a cascading effect in terms of lost revenue, reputation and trust. Here are some pointers on why maintaining uptime is critical for your business:
- Customer Trust: Customers expect brand websites or applications to be up and running to facilitate purchases and brand engagement and not the other way around.
- Revenue Loss: Your expenses are racking up as your systems remain down. Losses for either an ecommerce business and SaaS drop to almost every second of downtime inflicted.
- Employee Productivity: When your employee’s internal systems aren’t functional, their productivity nosedives, and so does your output.
- In summary, maximizing connectivity uptime means increasing business and customer satisfaction. But how do you achieve this? Let’s take a look.
- Regular Monitoring: The First Line of Defense
- One way to go about seemingly effortless network and server operations is to use monitoring. Consider it an employee that’s always watching over your network and runs a stark check over all servers to spot any issues before it’s too late.
-
What you should monitor:
- Network Traffic: Confirm that there’s no abnormal traffic or congestion that can lead towards bottlenecks.
- Server Performance: Track your server load alongside memory usage and CPU performance so you can address slowdowns before they increase in severity.
- Application Performance: Ensure that all of your key applications are operating properly and giving optimal user satisfaction.
Tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, and Datadog exist to help those who wish to monitor their systems in real-time. Most importantly, alerts can be set so that your IT department can tackle problems before they affect the company’s operations.
-
Automation for Regular Activities
The more processes you automate, the better the chances you have at eliminating human error. Managing Information Technology infrastructure entails many repetitive processes which could range from performing backups to software patching. If you manage these things on your own, there is bound to be an instance where something goes wrong. This is why you need an automated system.
Some Examples are:
- Automatic Backups: Schedule your servers to automatically back up important data frequently. This means that if a server goes offline, restoring data can be done easily and without hassle.
- Automatic Patching: Make your servers immune to security weaknesses by patching them automatically.
- Self-Healing Servers: Certain applications can enable your computers to reboot without any delay as soon as they become aware of any problems. This helps maintain uptime since manual intervention is not needed.
Automation eliminates the chance of human error, ensuring minimal downtime. In addition, accuracy and efficiency is heightened as well.
Frequent Upkeep and System Adjustments
Consider a car without any frequent servicing or maintenance—it is sure to come crashing down at some point, and a network and servers need the same care and attention. Maintenance is critical for getting maximum running time.
-
What basis do we use when referring to maintenance?
- Hardware Inspection: Ensure that each server’s physical parts are frequently examined and that any signs of deterioration that could cause any sort of failures are dealt with. For example, when a hard drive becomes too old, it can greatly increase the chances of a server crashing.
- Software Upgrades: Regularly upgrade all operating systems and software to make sure you’re working with the highest level of security and most efficient performing tools. Hackers are always planning to exploit security gaps, so keeping up to date is mandatory.
- Performance Optimization: Ensure that all server settings and the network configuration as well are checked to get them in line with the current load. This will ensure processes run as efficiently as possible.
Though frequent maintenance might appear to be more time-consuming, in reality it is much easier, less stressful, and more affordable than coping with a momentous total system breakdown.
-
Apply Redundancy For Critical Systems
Adding redundancy for critical systems make sure that maximum uptime is achievable. Redundancy ensures that in case one compartment fails; the other can work immediately, redundantly backing up the primary compartment.
A few examples of how redundancy can be achieved are as follows:
- Load Balancing: Load balancing is a process in which traffic is shared among a group of servers so that more than one machine retains optimum performance and so that one single machine does not get overloaded. As a result, even if a particular server crosses its threshold of failure, the other retained servers can work instead without having any impact on the users.
- Failover Systems: Failover systems are those systems in which the primary device is automatically replaced by a backup server or devices in the event of failure of the primary server. If one server goes down, a secondary server kicks in automatically.
- Data Replication: Replicating data means copying and maintaining database objects in more than one location. Other servers or the cloud can be used to maintain data in various locations for safekeeping. Hence, when a particular server breaks down, there is no chance of losing core business files.
The aim is to make sure that regardless of the situation, customers as well as employees are able to work seamlessly with minimal interruptions.
-
Take Advantage of Security Measures in Order to Reduce Downtime
To put it in another way, security does not only mean to protect and avert malicious users from phishing into your data, but to also shield the systems. Cyber attacks, such as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks or ransomware, can bring a lot of negative woes and also stall the operations of business almost entirely.
These measures will help protect you against cyberattacks:
- Firewalls: Firewalls which are up to date should be made to block traffic from unauthorized users.
- Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS): Use IDS that can recognize and alert your personnel about harmful activities so that the issue can be dealt with before it gets worse.
- Regular Security Audits: Regularly conduct security audits to check that your systems are not vulnerable to new types of threats.
- These audits alongside other advanced security measures can assist in keeping your servers and network away from cyber threats which guarantees business continuity and enhanced productivity.
- Scalability: Plan for Growth
As your business develops, so do your IT requirements. Failure to properly strategize may result in slow network and server infrastructure which in turn cause issues with outages. Adopting infrastructure that supports scaling enables you to expand as your requirements surge without causing disruption.
For instance, if you’re using cloud services, make sure your hosting provider can scale with your needs. If you operate in-house servers, be ready to add additional servers as demanded.
The key to successful scalability is ensuring that your business does not run out of resources in a way that halts productivity.
-
Disaster Recovery Plan
A server could go down, or a business can be attacked from outside by cybercriminals. Nature may also disallow business to function. A disaster recovery plan is necessary to ensure that your business can pick itself up with a lot of ease no matter what happens.
Essential components of guarantee you have an effective disaster recovery plan entails:
- Stores: Your backup data must provide true copies of all your important business data and be kept externally.
- Communication: Your customer base and employees must be informed in times of crisis.
- Drills: Like any other plan, the disaster plan must be executed regularly and before an actual disaster to determine its effectiveness.
- To make sure work can pick up quickly and with as minimal disturbance as possible, a strong dissaster recovery plan must be created.
Final Words
Automation, mastering planning, redundancy for security reasons is needed to maintain a network and servers along with all the intricate guiding principles. The more intricate one decides to make their business systems, the lower the chances that they will experience problems of downtime.
You can help your systems operate efficiently while maintaining maximum uptime and business productivity by monitoring your systems, automating repetitive processes, implementing redundancy, and securing your network against breaches. With the correct disaster recovery plan already in place, you’ll always be prepared for any non-standard events that may arise in the future.