How To Prevent Business Downtime

If you’re looking to grow your business within no time, you must find effective ways to boost productivity. This is how well a firm converts inputs into finished goods or services. Improved productivity leads to increased sales, reduced operational costs, and increased utilization of resources. It’s one of the best ways to maximize your profits and outshine other firms in the market.

One of the significant barriers to business productivity is downtimes. This is a period during which your business comes to a standstill. Common causes of business downtimes include technical glitches, equipment failure, natural disasters, network outages, and many others.

Increased downtimes can’t only render your business unproductive, but it can also lead to loss of opportunities. Find effective ways to minimize your business downtime.

That said, here are some simple yet effective ways to prevent business downtimes.

Hire Managed IT Services

As earlier noted, network failure is one of the significant causes of business downtime. And when it happens, it interferes with your communication systems. Therefore, you can’t operate your online business.

You can work with your internal IT employees to help monitor your business systems. However, at some point, such individuals might not provide adequate services. Why? Because they can’t work 24/7. At some point, they’ll get tired, thus requiring some time off duty.

Besides, in some other instances, your primary workers in the IT department might fall sick. This increases the vulnerability of your business networks to fail. That’s why you need to find managed IT services.

An IT service provider can prevent your system from failing. They can provide 24/7 supervision to your networks to ensure they work efficiently. In addition, a managed IT service company can advise you about the best systems you can install on your business website to minimize downtimes.

Today, cybersecurity attacks are a significant concern to any business organization. This is any malicious activity aimed at targeting the systems of a business. Common cybersecurity attacks include malware, phishing, ransomware, cross-site scripting, and SQL injections.

When cybercriminals attack your business, its systems might wholly or partially fail. This increases your downtime and can harm your overall business productivity. One of the best ways to avoid cybersecurity attacks is by working with a managed IT provider.

An IT company can provide better solutions to your business systems. They can tighten your online security by installing antivirus software to ensure your business isn’t affected by any malicious activities. If you want to boost the online security of your business and minimize its downtime, check out Netsurit’s NYC Managed it services and other similar firms.

Educate Employees

Human errors are one of the major causes of unplanned downtimes. This occurs when a worker accidentally interferes with your business systems or due to ignorance. For instance, an employee can plug or unplug cables from computers and other machines without following the correct procedures. This can render your systems unfunctional, causing downtime.

Human errors not only hurt your business productivity but can also cause accidents in the workplace. This can leave your workers seriously injured, forcing you to compensate them and pay for their medical charges.

Although some human errors are unavoidable, you can minimize them by training your workers regularly. This involves equipping your employees with knowledge of operating systems to ensure they’re not committing mistakes. The best time to prepare your workers is during staff meetings, forums, and workshops.

Update Your Systems Regularly

Sometimes deciding to upgrade your systems can be a difficult choice. This is true, especially when they’re still running fine. However, failure to update your systems or networks can harm your business in the future by causing downtime.

Outdated systems are more vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Hackers tend to scan such applications or software to determine their vulnerability. Therefore, if you’re still using ancient methods, you’re likely to face cybersecurity attacks and lose your data. And when this happens, you might close down your store while trying to recover your data. This increases your business downtime. Avoid this by updating your software regularly.

As a business owner or manager, most probably you’re too busy. This means that sometimes you might forget to update your business systems when necessary. You might want to install an automatic system update program on your website in such a case. This helps keep your networks up to date, thus preventing cybersecurity attacks. It goes a long way in preventing your business downtime.

Build Backup Plans

Although you might have the best cybersecurity measures in place, sometimes the bad guys can still access your systems, causing downtime. Apart from that, you can delete critical business information by mistake. This can render your business non-operational. That’s why you need to create a backup plan. It ensures you can immediately recover your data when you lose it and minimize downtime.

Electricity power outage is another thing that can increase your business downtime. This affects your productivity.

If your business is located in areas that experience a frequent electricity power outage, you need a backup system. Some of these include buying a generator or installing solar panels. Having a power backup ensures your business is operating 24/7.

Purchase High-Quality Equipment

Equipment forms an integral part of your business assets. These are tools used by your workers when performing their daily tasks. Various machines are designed to help accomplish specific tasks. Find high-quality equipment to help minimize your business downtime.

Low-quality machines can easily break down, causing your employees not to perform their duties. In other words, low-quality tools can increase your downtime.

Also, low-quality machines can quickly become non-operational due to wear and tear. This causes you to close your store when finding other tools, thus increasing your business downtime.

On the other hand, high-quality machines are built to last. They can’t easily break down. Using such devices helps avoid downtimes and boost your overall productivity. However, you must provide proper maintenance to them. Otherwise, they can cause downtime as well.

Boost Workers’ Healthy And Safe

When employees are ill, they become unproductive. This increases your business downtime. You can avoid this by boosting the health of your workers. One of the best ways to achieve this is by purchasing medical insurance covers for your workers. This enables them to go for medical checkups to identify and diagnose any minor health issue before it becomes a significant problem. It’s one of the best strategies to keep your workers healthy, thus preventing downtime.

Workplace accidents are other causes of business downtimes. It occurs when workers are injured to the extent that they can’t work. This not only increases your business downtime, but it can also attract a lot of costs in terms of compensation and medical bills.

You can prevent workplace injuries by training workers to operate specific machines. Also, ensure floors are clean. It would be best to put danger signs in areas you believe are risky to employees.

How Downtime Hurts Your Business

Downtimes can harm your business in various ways. These include:

Reduction In Profits

If you’re working with full-time workers, then you’re likely to reduce your business profits during downtime. You’re supposed to pay such workers monthly salaries regardless of whether they were fully productive or not.

During downtime, workers might not add any value to your business. Therefore, compensating them for the work they’ve not done significantly reduces your profits.

Also, sometimes downtimes can come with substantial recovery costs. For instance, losing your business data to hackers can cost you a lot of money to recover. This also minimized your profits.

Loss Of Customers

Customers are essential to the success of your business. They purchase your products or services, thus boosting your sales. This implies that customers are the sales.

Downtimes are one of the primary reasons customers seek products or services from your competitors. For instance, if customers want to make purchases online but find out that your payment system isn’t working, they might be forced to seek help elsewhere. This causes you to lose customers and sales. At the same time, it increases your competition.

Employee Turnover

If you want to grow your business, you must prevent staff turnover. This is the rate at which workers leave your company for other employment opportunities. The impact of high employee turnover includes increased recruitment costs, decreased productivity, loss of sales, and wastage of time, especially when training new employees.

There are many causes of staff turnover. One of them is frequent downtimes. For instance, if your bookkeeping team won’t utilize their accounting software, they will waste much time. This leads to reduced morale, causing workers to seek employment opportunities elsewhere.

Brand Damage

Today, customers seek to connect with a business with an established positive reputation. Reputation is an opinion held by customers about your business. It’s advisable to build a positive reputation for your business.

While downtimes can immediately reduce your productivity, they can also damage your brand in the long run. When customers cannot connect with you due to frequent network failure, they’ll share their negative experiences with others online. This damages your brand reputation, thus chasing potential customers away.

Takeaway

If you want to boost your business productivity, you must prevent downtime. This involves putting effective measures to ensure machines and workers are operating efficiently at all times. You can implement the strategies above to help avoid business downtime.


Ravi Randell is a business manager and a freelance writer. He writes blog posts and guest posts about business-related topics. Ravi enjoys playing basketball and volleyball in his free time.



Published by ExitAdviser

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