4 Strategies to Avoid Application Downtime and Maintain Business Continuity

According to a recent Veeam report, an hour of downtime from a high-priority application costs organizations approximately $67,651. Moreover, an average outage lasts almost two hours. When business-critical applications go down, it seriously impacts organizations’ operational continuity, which affects deliverables, and ultimately impacts their bottom line. Downtime is a serious problem that’s intolerable in today’s “always-on” digital economy. So what can your organization do to minimize the frequency and fallout of expensive downtime, protect data and ensure business continuity in a challenging business landscape?

1. Deploy Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools

All organizations want to maintain their applications at peak performance. But this often seems easier said than done. With APM tools, you can proactively identify, isolate and diagnose potential issues in business applications. They can alert you to issues and possible failures before a real disaster strikes. As a result, you can quickly resolve problems, and increase your chances of achieving optimal availability and performance. APM tools tailored for your specific environment are even better at ensuring application availability and minimizing downtime. Some more ways APM tools can deliver tangible value are: • Reduce the likelihood of lost revenues • Minimize risk of regulatory non-compliance • Save time and increase productivity • Proactively manage apps and take advantage of improvement opportunities

2. Modernize Your Business Continuity Infrastructure

In the same Veeam report, 40% of respondents said that they relied on legacy systems –tools that back up on-premises file shares and applications – to protect and manage their data. These unreliable, antiquated technologies cannot prevent application downtime. They also hinder firms’ ability to achieve long-term digital transformation. Legacy systems cost companies time and resources and are also ineffective at providing reliable data protection. That’s why organizations must let go of such systems, and embrace more modern cloud-based infrastructure. A modern infrastructure strategy should utilize multiple cloud-based capabilities, including the ability to move workloads from one cloud to another, as well as robust Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

3. Implement and Test Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Solutions

To meet new industry demands, today’s companies must protect their data at all times. The alternative – data breaches or losses can cost an average of $3.92 million! This is why data protection and disaster recovery should be critical elements of every organization’s IT modernization and digital transformation efforts. The cloud plays a pivotal part in today’s data protection strategy thanks to its ability to improve the reliability of backups, move around workloads on the fly, and save costs and resources. Of course, it’s not enough to just implement a robust disaster recovery solution. You must also test it regularly to determine if you can deliver against your SLAs. Testing will also enable you to identify issues in your recoverability early. Further, automated, application-level disaster recovery testing is easy to execute, and provides invaluable data to further strengthen your disaster recovery capabilities.

4. Regularly Monitor your IT Infrastructure and Facilities

Regular monitoring of your IT infrastructure is a powerful way to maintain application uptime. Implement an application management solution that monitors and follows your applications as they dynamically move between virtual machines. By understanding the virtual infrastructure, and the relationships and interactions between its various components, the solution will enable you to detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents, maintain high performance, and perform capacity planning. Regularly test your backups for both physical and virtual machines to confirm that you can easily do restores. Check devices like switches, workstations, firewalls, etc. to make sure they’re all operating as they should. Automate these tasks with network inventory and network configuration management software. Install updates and patches for operating systems, hardware, and applications Finally, perform physical checks on your facilities to find issues that may pose a risk to your hardware, such as overly hot server rooms, airflow blockages, water damage, and physical equipment damage.