Avoiding Disruptions and Downtime in the Workplace by Having the Right IT Solutions

Does your business experience outages that leave employees unable to do their work for a given amount of time? Perhaps it’s unscheduled outages due to network failures, planned outages for system upgrades, or system failures, where critical systems need to be brought back online or even replaced.

There are a number of various ways that you can help ensure your IT systems are always available when your employees need them, or downtimes are seriously minimized.

Backup and recovery

Your business needs backups of all your data, including files, applications, and even system configurations, so if/when systems fail, you can get back up and running again as soon as possible. There are various different ways in which you can do this.

Offsite backups

Offsite backups are critical in the event of something like a natural disaster: a flood, fire, etc., or even a cyberattack on your systems. If all your data is in one physical location and gets taken out in one hit, then your business is up the creek without a paddle.

Offsite backups at a secure datacentre or multiple datacentres is your insurance policy; this is what’s called a private cloud. The other option is switching over to public cloud backups, such as Microsoft Azure or AWS solutions.

Regular snapshots

Did you know you can take snapshots of physical systems (including system architectures, applications, and files) and store them virtually? By regularly taking system snapshots (e.g. daily, hourly) then in the event of a failure, you can run systems from virtual servers until you restore services and/or use these snapshots to roll your physical systems back.

Regular overnight patches and upgrades

Your IT systems and applications often have patches and upgrades that contain critical security updates. Generally, you want to apply these out of regular working hours, unless the patch is an extremely serious update.

Setting systems up to do this automatically means you can set and forget, with minimal interruption to the working day.

Network reliability

Network outages are a fact of life. Even Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, experiences outages which can affect your business if you aren’t careful. Here’s how to get the best network reliability.

Choosing the right ISP, technology and plan

Business or enterprise plans with a Tier 1 ISP (e.g. Telstra, Optus), instead of with a reseller, generally provide you with the most reliable networking capability and guaranteed speeds. Checking out Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each ISP, technology (e.g. fibre, NBN) and plan will ensure you know what you’re getting yourself into.

Combining networking solutions

To give you even more reliability, you have options like combining different ISPs, technologies, and plans. There is also the option to use SD-WANs or MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) to get better results. Configurations utilizing load balancing help you make the most of your networks.

Remote work capabilities

There is now more demand than ever to enable employees to work remotely, whether it’s one day a week at home, or just checking emails on the bus on the way to the office.

Modern problems require modern solutions, which is why it’s important to give your employees the ability to work with ease with your systems even while they’re not in the office.

What does this mean for you as an employer? Checklist items include fast, reliable enterprise mobile plans, BYOD or other mobile options for employees, and security that is tight – even away from the office. This requires an integrated approach to ensure a smooth rollout.

Choosing the right IT provider

Partnering with the right IT solutions provider means they can take care of all these IT services for you while keeping you informed of your configuration and new options that may be better for your business. Choosing a provider who has experience with all of the above means you don’t have to shop around, instead of picking and choosing a handful of different providers to take care of each of these options separately.

This is why A1 Technologies have developed deep knowledge and partnerships with excellent service providers in each of these verticals. We know our clients want to be assured of reliability and minimization of any downtimes – and we seek to provide the full range of services to do so.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help ensure maximum productivity and reliability from your systems, then reach out. It’s our pleasure to walk you through how we can help your business be more fail-safe.

Julia Sinclair-Jones

Tech writer and ex-software developer with a penchant for travel, techno, and data. Spreading the word of secure, manageable, optimised IT solutions for everyone.