In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, there is no time for downtime. Just ask the businessman who needs to complete an important transaction but cannot login to the banking app on his phone. On the other hand, the bank that suffered from the application’s downtime will have to deal with so much more than just an irate customer’s wrath.
Indeed, for a company with more than 10,000 employees, downtime losses are estimated to be valued at $896,000 per week. And while it’s easy to say that such a large figure is only relevant to mega businesses like Amazon—in 2013, the company reportedly lost nearly $2 million or $66,240 per minute due to an outage that lasted 30 minutes—the issue of downtimes affects businesses of all kinds and sizes.
In fact, the resulting unquantifiable losses like trust and satisfaction ratings can be more damaging to a smaller company compared to financial deficits, especially when it is still trying to grow its customer base. This just means that any unplanned downtime has a negative impact to business, and this only underscores just how important high availability (or HA) software is nowadays.
HA software and methodologies aim to maintain uninterrupted business operations for as long as possible, typically gunning for 99.999% availability or roughly only 5 minutes of downtime per year. Without a high availability solution in place, your business is likely to be offline more often and for longer periods, which is certainly bad for business. But there is more to HA software than just the numbers. Here a few reasons why HA software is crucial for business growth.
Prevents Data Loss
Did you know that 70% of businesses that experience data loss cease operations within a year? That’s how important data can be for any kind of enterprise.
HA software solutions help reduce data loss by setting up one or more standby environments that immediately kick in should the primary environment fail for any reason. The standby environments are kept in sync with the primary environment through real-time data integration techniques so that, if necessary, the system can repair any data discrepancies. These software also employ database replications tools for high availability, so the most recent version of the data is always available.
High availability software also gives your system sufficient time to recover from system or component failures, without too much of a disruption of your status quo. Finally, data replication tools used as part of your HA implementation can also help improve your data backup strategies.
Reduce Customer Churn
As mentioned earlier, downtimes have a significant financial impact on any kind of business. However, apart from the economic consequences, the qualitative aspects of your organization may also suffer without an HA software solution. Chief among these is customer retention. If your customers are regularly inconvenienced by messages like “Sorry, our app is under maintenance,” then they are more likely to switch to a competitor.
In relation, a high availability software solution also helps minimize the overall impact of planned maintenance activities. In fact, you can even completely avoid service disruptions during these maintenance schedules if you have an HA solution in place, especially if the activity only requires a few minutes, say the deployment of bug fixes in an app.
Improve Business Reputation
Conversely, high availability software helps boost your positive reputation. If your brand is known for its reliability, accuracy, and speed versus your competitors, then your customers are more likely to stay loyal. The reduced or even virtually non-existent downtimes, made possible by an HA software solution, sends a message to your customers that you value their business.
HA software solutions also improve your database’s security and makes real-time reporting and failure detection possible, thus improving your reputation not only to your customers but to your business partners as well.
With an HA solution in place, you can serve your customers under all circumstances. And while it may seem complicated or daunting at first, implementing an HA solution comes with various benefits that impact your business’ productivity and reliability.