What Causes IT Downtime? (Tips & Insights)

What Causes IT Downtime, And How Does It Affect Your Organization?

Part of managing an organization is implementing efficient processes and reliable productivity standards. Without question, IT plays a huge role in the efficiency of an organization.

Case in point: IT downtime costs organizations huge sums of money yearly and can also be a leading indicator of even more inefficiencies to come.

What Are The Main Causes Of IT Downtime?

Outdated Technology

Outdated hardware and software often lead to compatibility problems, slowed processes, and loss of data. Decisions to save money short term can cost organizations much more over time.

Inefficient Processes

If you don’t have a plan and processes in place to respond to an incident with IT, this will increase downtime dramatically.

For example, as a small organization, you might have one internal IT staff member, and at some point, he finally gets a day off. On that day, one of your supervisors can’t access their email and is unaware that the IT staff person is on vacation. There was no backup plan put in place to support staff that day. The supervisor is now limited in what they can do, and their downtime and productivity will not only affect themselves but also others working with them.

Human Error

Information Technology Intelligence Corp.’s (ITIC) 2018 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Survey, which surveyed more than 800 customers worldwide, found that 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the top cause of unplanned downtime — examples include:

• Misconfiguration of server hardware
• Failure to upgrade or right-size servers to accommodate more data and compute-intensive workloads like virtualization
• Failure to recognize outmoded applications that are no longer supported by the vendor
• Failure to keep up to date on patches and security

Security Issues And Disasters

Cyber attacks are a daily concern. With more of us working from home and/or remotely, we have become more vulnerable to bad players that take advantage of any opening. Disasters, whether they are natural or caused by an attack, can be devastating to an organization. If no plan is in place the cost can be staggering.

How Does This Impact Your Organization?

• Lost Revenue: It changes the mindset in the entire organization and will affect your future plans concerning staffing, budgeting, and more.
• Lost Productivity: This is a measure of the efficiency of a person completing a task. In an organization that is based on repeated activities to produce revenue, anything that impedes that ability will impact the organization’s productivity.
• Reputation: Since you are supported by the community, without a strong reputation and overall feeling that their tax dollars are utilized efficiently and effectively, asking for renewals or additional funds will be impacted.
• Staff Morale: If IT issues prevent employees from doing their job effectively, this just compounds the cost of downtime. At the same time retention and recruitment of good staff members will be affected.

As a leader in your organization, you can control all the above. Given how IT downtime can affect every aspect of an organization, it’s critical that the plans and processes that are put in place ensure you have reliable IT and minimal downtime.

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