They don’t say “time is money” for nothing. And when IT goes down, the dollars add up. In early 2015, an IDC research report estimated that between $1 billion and $2.5 billion was lost each year due to application outages alone. At the time, a Fortune 1000 company could expect an hour of infrastructure downtime to cost $100,000. Not-so-fun fact: That’s costing you roughly $1666.6 per minute.
Even if you work at a smaller business, any outage can still be costly and painful. The number one source of downtime? Hardware failure. In fact, the Quorum Disaster Recovery Report estimated that hardware failure alone accounted for 55 percent of downtime among SMBs.
Don’t freak out just yet! You can minimize the impact of hardware failure by taking a few proactive steps. With a little effort, you can drastically reduce the frequency and fallout of downtime. How? Focusing on preventative server and infrastructure maintenance.
The basics: IT infrastructure and maintenance
So what’s the key to keeping IT systems operational in the face of hardware failure? Reducing risk and having a plan B. This includes putting redundant systems in place in the event something goes awry, being able to predict when infrastructure might fail… and preventing it. Here are a few steps you can take to avoid downtime and minimize the impact of planned outages.
1) Regularly test server backups
When a server goes down, you can reduce damage if you get it back online quickly. And if all else fails, you can count on restoring a backup. Regularly check your backups (for both physical and virtual machines) and test them to make sure you can actually do a restore. After all, a backup is only useful if you can get your data… back!
2) Check on your facilities
Dangers to your infrastructure exist in both the physical and digital worlds. Water damage, fires, clumsy humans, and furry critters chewing through the cables all can cause IT mayhem. Best practice: perform weekly physical checks to ensure the shop is in good shape. It’s also prime time to check for obvious hazards: cables someone could trip over, air flow blockages, physical damage to any of your equipment, or facility issues (like an overly hot server room) that might pose a risk to your hardware.
3) Monitor your devices
How do you better understand if a server is about to fail? Monitor its health status so you can watch for potential red flags. This is where a network monitoring solution such as Spiceworks can come in handy. You can get alerts on unusual events including high CPU or memory usage or if a server reboots itself suddenly. Network monitoring software provides an extra level of protection… so you can stress less.
Every once in a while you should also check on other devices such as switches, workstations, and firewalls to make sure everything’s in order, they’re operating as they should, and no settings are out of place. These tasks can be automated with network inventory and network configuration management software.
4) Regularly update devices
Finally, to maintain the health, stability, and security of your devices, you should install updates and patches for operating systems, hardware, and applications. You can do this on a regular basis for workstations, but because regular maintenance on servers means some downtime that affect a large number of users, special precautions should be taken.
Server Maintenance window best practices:
- Try to schedule maintenance at a time that’ll minimize impact to users (typically after hours)
- Communicate the planned outage well in advance (typically sending an email or calendar invite to all affected users is adequate)
- Automate patching with tools (such as WSUS) to minimize downtime, especially if you must update multiple servers
- If you’re using network monitoring software, you don’t want your IT team to get a flood of alerts about servers going offline during a planned maintenance window. Network monitoring software such as Spiceworks allows you to specify a time period to mute alerts so your IT team doesn’t get any false alarms.
How do you ultimately benefit from all this maintenance? Simple: It reduces the chance of a device failure, which can kill productivity and cost an organization. By planning regular checkups of your equipment and utilizing software such as Spiceworks, you can better maintain your infrastructure and ensure minimal downtime.
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