Major Causes of IT Downtime: What you should know

Last updated on June 23rd, 2022 at 04:24 am

• As per a survey, medium and large businesses lose over 100 million USD every year due to IT downtime. 

In the technology-driven world, the IT structure of the business must work smoothly for seamless operations. If technology doesn’t work well, it can negatively impact business productivity. 

Moreover, the performance of your IoT devices and network elements will get hampered. To resolve the same, you must know the major causes behind IT downtime. This will help you to steer clear of IT downtime in the future. 

So, what are the major causes of IT downtime? Let’s find out. 

Human error – The foremost reason to experience IT downtime is human error. As per a study by the Information Technology Issues Council, over 49% of IT downtime occurs because of human error. It takes place when the employees do not pay attention to the standard or protocols. 

The best way to deal with this problem is to train your employees about the latest configurations, updates, and security challenges. Additionally, you can go for implementing secure access policies. In this way, the attackers won’t get the chance to hack into your network. 

Cybersecurity threats – It would not be wrong to say that cybersecurity attacks are increasing day by day. To tackle these issues, you can adopt multi-factor authentication, spam filters, and fraud detection software. These simple yet intuitive measures will keep the attackers at bay. 

Many business houses do not have a proper IT security team. In such cases, outsourced technical support is a perfect way out. They will rightly help you with the security strategies and reduce the odds of human errors.

Hardware failure – There are times when your hardware fails. Improper working of servers leads to a halt in business operations. The major cause behind it is that you need replacement or repair of the hardware. And this replacement/repair can take several days. 

What is the solution here? To have redundancy with the help of duplicating the hardware such as switches, firewalls, and networks. Hence, in case your hardware ceases to perform, you can shift to the other devices, thereby reducing the IT downtime. 

Security flaws – Hackers seize the opportunity if there is any network vulnerability to intrude across the local area network or wide area network that leads to downtime. Most organizations faced at least four 30-minutes network outages in the year 2019. And the cost of these outages was between 305,000-6,000,000 USD.

Every organization should have a proactive security strategy to deal with these kinds of emerging threats. 

Instability of the server – There are times when new servers do not perform up to their potential. You may think that the local/wide area network is working well. But, the server will show instability. 

In most cases, the reason for the same is that the IT team tries to use the latest technology with the old hardware. Or it could be bugs, power supply glitches, or firmware upgrades. So, it is advisable to outsource the technical team to resolve the issues like that.

To sum it all up

The above-mentioned are the major causes of IT downtime. In order to avoid the same, outsource the technical support or an IT team. They will not only minimize the damage caused by IT downtime but will also protect your business from attackers/hackers.