Wouldn’t 100% uptime be your ideal vision? Is it even possible to achieve in any given year? Maybe and maybe not. But you should be at least at 99.8% uptime. Get any less than that, and your healthcare business (or any business for that matter) loses a ton of capacity to serve, grow, and profit.First Thing’s First: If You See a 100% Uptime Guarantee, Know What It Means. In reality, no one can guarantee 100% uptime for your network – ever. Human error still exists so things can go wrong at any time. For example, the utility company could accidentally sever the fiber line running to your healthcare company. If 100% uptime were actually possible, that company would instantly become a multi-billion dollar corporation and take over the IT support industry.
However, 100% uptime isn’t necessarily a scam, either. What the offer generally refers to is that if that uptime isn’t met, you get some perks for free. You might be offered extra server space, for example.
Where this issue gets a little dodgy is sometimes companies offering a 100% uptime guarantee absolve themselves of responsibility under certain conditions, like fire, flood, hurricane, snowstorm, and other natural disasters. Make sure you read the fine print if you really want to work with this type of company, or work with one that’s a little more transparent.
A Few Steps Your Disaster Recovery Team Should Take to Maximize Network Uptime
Here’s what your contracted service should be doing to make sure your network stays up as much as possible:
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- Do It Right the First Time: The road to network downtime is paved with poor-quality, inexpensive hardware. As with anything, you get what you pay for. Be willing to have high-quality hardware installed in the first place, and you’ll earn dividends down the road.
- Monitor & Replace Your Hardware: Whoever your IT support team is, make sure they constantly monitor the age and health of your hardware. It’s easier on your business to replace hardware ahead of time than it is to respond to a crisis that already happened.
- Use Network Monitoring Tools: Not only should you actively check your hardware, but you should be monitoring your entire network at all times. That way, you find bottlenecks as they happen and keep your bandwidth and uptime high.
- Ongoing Security Monitoring: Are you seeing a pattern here? Your IT support team should have a data protection plan in place. That means using the latest firewalls, antivirus, and antimalware products available. You may even want to have an independent firm come in and perform an audit annually.
- Know When to Back Off: With certain hardware, like your servers (if you keep them on-site and don’t operate fully over the cloud), be willing to let them go when you know they’ve done their job. Don’t try to squeeze every last bit of usefulness you can get out of them.
Remember, 100% uptime is never truly possible. But you should be able to get extremely close with these tips.
Let Great Lakes Computer help. We are offering a FREE disaster recovery and data backup network assessment to qualifying businesses. Register through this email for your assessment and receive a $25 Visa Gift card upon the completion of your assessment.
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