Imagine yourself, as an IT manager of a company that operates 24 hours a day on the internet, arriving at work on a Monday morning and discovering that your website and IT service were down all weekend.
Now, try to calculate the financial losses that the unavailability of these services can generate for an organization, such as a bank or a credit union, for example. Evaluate the number of accesses to internet banking services that these companies receive daily and how many customers can be directly affected by not being able to carry out their transactions.
In addition to financial losses, when an IT service becomes unavailable, it can generate a series of negative consequences for a business, as we will see below:
What are the damages caused by the unavailability of an IT service?
Reduction in business productivity
Whenever an IT service becomes unavailable, it affects one or more people, but generally several of them. These people can be employees or customers, in addition to the IT team that must stop their routine work to search for the cause and solution of the problem.
Business productivity is inevitably affected, since part of the employees stop performing their tasks due to the unavailability of the IT service.
Loss of credibility with customers and users
With the unavailability of an IT service, it is natural that it generates frustration in those trying to access it. When this happens with customers, this frustration can be even more dangerous, because it puts at risk not only the credibility of the IT service, but also of the company, as the association ends up becoming natural.
Going back to our previous example, imagine a new customer of a credit union trying to access their mobile app for the first time and encountering an unavailable service. This customer starts with a negative impression of the company, running the risk of giving up on being your customer.
Greater difficulty in incident remediation
Everyone who depends on an IT service to perform their work eagerly awaits correction, pressuring the team responsible for a quick solution when it becomes unavailable.
However, not all problems are easy to fix. Many require tests to be performed to identify the causes and depend on external resources for correction. Demanding more agility only harms the IT team, which will work under more pressure and with a higher chance of not doing a good job, increasing the risks of new incidents.
Higher IT operational cost
Another loss is related to the IT operational cost. When services begin to experience problems constantly, support costs increase exponentially. Furthermore, when the lack of this service begins to affect the business, the company tends to make unplanned purchases, investing in emergency resources just thinking about how to re-establish access again.
This type of unplanned investment is usually much higher than the market standard, as it does not allow the business to conduct proper research and make good negotiations with suppliers.
What can be done to solve this?
Well, so far we have seen the consequences that the unavailability of an IT service causes in a company. But what can its managers and IT team do so that this does not happen?
Monitoring
Monitoring key IT services and equipment is essential to anticipate failures in order to prevent them from becoming unavailable. Many monitoring solutions are capable of identifying out-of-pattern behaviors, which can be signs that a service is about to stop working.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance helps increase the lifespan of many IT equipment items, besides helping in the identification and resolution of problems.
Many incidents that cause service stops happen due to the accumulation of problems over a period, and all this can be solved with periodic preventive maintenance.
Backup and contingency plans
When a problem cannot be avoided, it needs to be bypassed as soon as possible to avoid major losses for the business.
By relying on good database management, even if an IT service becomes unavailable, the company will be supported by solutions that ensure business continuity, drastically reducing potential losses.
Constant updating of the IT infrastructure
Many unavailability problems are caused by outdated IT environments that can no longer support current business demand. Therefore, keeping an IT infrastructure always updated is a way to avoid problems and reduce stoppage risks, thus minimizing the chances of a service becoming unavailable.
Also, try to keep equipment and systems that have active warranty and support contracts directly with the manufacturer, so your company can count on more support in an emergency situation.
IT team always alert (SLA)
Keeping an IT team always alert and ready to handle emergency situations is essential to minimize the impacts of a lack of availability of an IT service.
If your organization relies on an external partner to support its technological environment, look to hire a trustworthy company, with a qualified team and preferably offering the option of SLA contracts — an acronym for “service level agreement”, providing more security in solving emergency problems.
As we have seen, when an IT service becomes unavailable, it generates a series of negative consequences for a business. The fact is that there is no way to eliminate 100% of the chances of a service stoppage, however, certain precautions can be taken to minimize various risks and reduce the impacts caused by an unexpected failure.
As a company’s dependence on IT increases every day, the impacts caused when an IT service is unavailable tend to be increasingly greater. Therefore, it is necessary to be increasingly careful and attentive to signs that may warn of a greater risk.
So? Did our article help answer your questions on the subject? Tell us in the comments.
