September 13, 2019 Early Downtime Detection Saves Money

Downtime can cost your business upwards of $10,000 an hour. Early detection helps keep costs low and businesses running smoothly.

September 3, 2019

We rely on automation for a lot of things, but unfortunately it is not foolproof. Things like autopilot, GPS, electricity grids, financial markets, and many business functions are automated, and when there is an attack or outage, downtime can cost upwards of $10,000 an hour until it is brought back online. In our modern tech-dependent world, how can we detect outages sooner to get them repaired more quickly?

We Are Growing More Tech Dependent Than Ever

When was the last time you hopped in the car to go to a new place and brought a paper map along with you? Chances are you just entered your destination into your phone or your car’s GPS and followed the route it told you to. Not only do we depend on these devices for directions when we are out on business trips, but we also now depend on the devices to route us around traffic jams thanks to real-time traffic reports.

Unfortunately when the automated tech fails it can cause serious issues. Earlier this year, a GPS glitch caused cars to be routed around a wreck at the Denver airport, but cars instead ended up in a muddy field involved in a second wreck instead of getting around the first wreck, and it took 100 drivers ending up in the pileup before the problem was discovered.

But these glitches don’t stop us from putting more things into an automated state. The Internet of Things is full of automations we never knew we needed, from doorbells that show us who’s there without even having to be home to lights and thermostats that can be controlled remotely. This tech is starting to make it into offices worldwide, from break rooms to boardrooms, and no one notices until it goes offline.

A whopping 70% of IoT devices are B2B related. These can be things that control access to websites and emails, intranet and servers, and critical operations and infrastructure.

Why Depend On Tech If It’s Not Reliable?

As more things get automated and more outages occur, we might begin to ask why we are automating all these things in the first place. Automation is meant to take a burden off of the human element in our businesses and even in our daily lives. Computers are often programmed to take over tasks that humans can be easily bored by and they often do them better than humans because they don’t tune the tasks out or get overwhelmed at the repetition over time.

As technology improves, so does our reliance on it. Computers have been beating us at our own games for decades, starting with a game of checkers in 1962. Games seem trivial, but each progression on artificial intelligence has brought us closer to computers that can outthink us, and last year the Alibaba computer outperformed humans on a reading comprehension test, signaling massive growth in the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

This massive intelligence can be used to take over many of the operations we depend on humans for since the tech can now mimic human thinking and logic. This means even more automation in the future, which means greater chances for outages and other issues that may go unnoticed unless we build safeguards into these systems.

Unreliable Tech Isn’t The Only Problem

Hackers can also disable systems without alerting you to their presence. In some cases hackers can be present in a system for years before they even do anything that could be detected through an outage or disruption of service. There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds but only a quarter of organizations globally feel prepared to handle such an attack.

95% of cybersecurity breaches are a result of human error, and automated systems are responsible for preventing the bulk of them. But what happens to the 5% of cyber attacks that make it past the automated systems designed to prevent them? How do you know when you’ve experienced a systems failure or that a security breach has been effective due to human error?

Fighting Outages Through Monitoring

More than half of American adults think they are using the internet safely, but in tests 77% of young adults failed to correctly identify a secure link and 70% considered a malicious URL to be safe. Businesses aren’t monitoring and in half of cases they don’t even have basic security programs installed.

Monitoring your systems so that you know when there is an outage can save your business a lot of money and even bad publicity in some cases. The sooner you know you have a problem, the sooner you can fix it. Learn more about the cost of downtime below.

Infographic by CloudRadar Server Monitoring

Downtime can cost your business upwards of $10,000 an hour. Early detection helps keep costs low and your business running smoothly.

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, a leading infographic design agency in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s. Brian runs #LinkedInLocal events, hosts the Next Action Podcast, and has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present.

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