How to avoid critical system failure

Even when you do everything right, the unexpected can happen. Natural disasters strike, equipment fails, and human errors occurs. While steps were taken to mitigate risk, when disaster strikes, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back online are taken correctly, and time is never on your side.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate. Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different through today’s lens. This week, we focus on critical system failure and how unexpected outages can bring a company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Losses can be initially staggering and ultimately far-reaching, impacting not only revenue and productivity but also long-term brand value. It’s been estimated that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, with $140,000 per hour on the low end and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end. Absorbing the activities to resolve the issue itself and then putting in place actions across the organization to recover from the critical failure and its consequences can derail an organization for an extended period of time.

But what if you could offload that preparation, training, and responsibility to an organization you trust to manage it all for you? With a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, experts who are contractually committed to ensuring your business continuity are shouldering that burden. Not only can you remove that task and worry from your list, but when a failure of some kind inevitably occurs, you will likely never even experience a disruption. Such is the type of redundancies and fail-safes that SaaS organizations put in place. But also, with that shift of responsibility, your team can instead focus additional time on other strategic initiatives with higher business value.

By moving from on-premise enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, you can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your workforce.

An Infor customer in the distribution industry found themselves facing a catastrophic scenario. They relied on a legacy on-premises solution for over 30 years. While it had been dependable for decades, the day the system failed, there were no longer any technicians familiar with the solution and no feasible way to recover. The owner decided the only logical step forward in that critical moment was a move to the cloud, which allowed them to recover. In hindsight, it would have been ideal to begin that transition to the cloud years earlier, but they are now benefitting from more than peace of mind.

In this uniquely challenging environment, operational continuity has never been more important to your business. If you find the themes covered in our blog post relevant to your business, we invite you to download this eBook on how to avoid business-damaging scenarios caused by outdated IT systems.

In our next blog, we look at the effect of the loss of technical expertise in legacy IT infrastructure and applications.