Downtime is going to happen in any business. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in; there are always going to be those times when productivity is impacted, and you aren’t going to get stuff done. However, planned and unplanned downtime are vastly different.
With planned downtime, you can reassess your operations and still get things done to account for the lack of access or technology for pre-planned upgrades, repairs, and maintenance. Unplanned downtime, however, is the kind of downtime you want to avoid or reduce. This is when things go awry without your prior planning and can throw your day or even week out the window and massively impact production.
But if it’s unplanned, can you reduce it? Not 100%. There will always be some issues you cannot altogether avoid, but you can prepare for many problems that will impact your ability to stay up and running, and these tips can help you avoid being slowed down.
1. Proactive Maintenance Monitoring
The best way to avoid unplanned downtime is to partake in proactive monitoring and maintenance. This means you need to perform regular tasks such as routine updates and backups and monitor systems for any changes, faults, or issues that crop up. You can utilise IT Support to help you monitor and identify issues and get them resolved before they become more significant concerns.
Make a point of collecting monitoring data and use it to identify recurring issues or weak spots that you can tackle so they don’t cause additional problems.
2. Incident Management
How you deal with an incident is a massive factor in how fast you can get up and running again. This means you need to have set protocols for how you deal with issues, who it is reported to, and escalation resolution and documentation. With effective established incident protocols, you can speed up how quickly problems are identified and dealt with so you can reduce downtime if it’s unavoidable.
3. Continuity Planning
Continuity planning means you can get essential systems up and running quickly in the event of downtime. You need to develop recovery and backup plans and have effective disaster recovery training so that all employees know what to do in the event of different emergencies and are well-versed in how to trigger recovery actions and begin the incident management process. The more they know and can handle should things go wrong, the less of an impact it will have and the easier it will be to get things going again.
IT management is critical for every business, and threats can come from a variety of sources. From cyber attacks to equipment malfunctions, natural disasters, or human error. In most cases, effective management can help you reduce unplanned downtime and make arrangements for alternative work to be carried out in those items where you can schedule downtime. But the more prepared you are for any disaster, the better chance you have to minimise disruption and keep running as much as possible. Because if you fail to put policies and procedures in place, the alternative is a loss of productivity, loss of customers, reduced output, and poor reputation.
Image credit . This is a contributed post.