Planning for the Unexpected: How to Protect Your Business from Downtime

'One minute of downtime can cost an organization $8,851, on average.' (Emerson Network Power, '2016 Cost of Data Center Outages')

No matter how you look at it, downtime is an expensive hassle but one that must be expected-no matter how much you've planned, downtime is still very much a danger.

We've all seen the various news reports on organizations that have faced their own challenges with downtime. Last year, bothSouthwest Airlines and Deltahad to cancel more than two thousand flights from two separate network outages. Last September, multiple airlines using the Amadeus Altéa Suite, a customer management system (CMS) for the airline industry, were hit with aworldwide software outage. The system disruption led to many delayed flights and frustrated travelers.

Another major downtime event took place last spring, when a number of websites and applications were 'either partially or fully broken' as a result of an Amazon AWS S3 outage.

Amazon AWS S3 outage affected businesses across various industries, from publishers, retailers, and many others. Among the businesses affected by the AWS outage includes Quora, Business Insider, and Slack.

There is no question that downtime is costly. According to Emerson Network Power's '2016 Cost of Data Center Outages,' downtime can cost:

• $1.25 billion to$2.5 billion per year for unplanned application downtime
• $100,000 per hourfor infrastructure failure
• $500,000 to $1 million per hourfor critical application failure

Companies are often well prepared for planned downtime events, like scheduled maintenance and migration. However, it's the unexpected crisis that can be hard to anticipate and therefore, plan for, like Southwest's router issue or Delta's fire. Other unexpected downtime events can be caused by:

• Bugs or component failures
• Network or vendor outages
• Human error
• Severe weather/natural disaster
• Cyber attack

Expect the Unexpected

Unexpected downtime often means that you can't access or make use of your data, which can ultimately interfere with your daily business operations. It's crucial to prepare for any type of downtime with a business continuity plan, backup processes, and a managed file transfer (MFT) platform with high availability. Unexpected downtime can be the most damaging to the service level agreements (SLAs) you have with your customers, partners or third-party vendors. Uptime guarantees are commonly included in SLAs, requiring a level of availability commitment. There are the 'three nines,' 'four nines,' 'five nines,' and the 'six nines,' which translate to:

• Three-nines: 99.9% level of availability, allowing 8 hours, 46 minutes of downtime per year
• Four-nines: 99.99% level of availability, allowing 52 minutes and 36 seconds of downtime per year
• Five-nines: 99.999% level of availability, allowing 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year

In each case, the nines refer to reliability and availability. Achieving these nines means finding the most reliable and available systems, such as those a high availability configuration with an MFT platform.

Meet SLAs to Avoid the Uptime Funk with an MFT Platform

WithEnhanced File Transfer (EFT) with High Availability, you can reduce your downtime risks and meet your SLAs, achieving an enhanced throughput that allows for a collective MFT environment to efficiently use available resources. EFT with HA helps you protect your critical business processes and ensure that your crucial file transfer systems are 'always on.' Your employees, customers and business partners can experience seamless availability of critical applications and information, even during periods of uncertainty or crisis.

How to Achieve High Availability with EFT Enterprise

EFT Enterprise's active-active clustering provides high availability using multiple instances of EFT and a load balancer for non-stop availability of your network. And unlike active-passive failover clusters, all of the nodes in EFT Enterprise's active-active deployment are put to work in production-with no standby hardware, and no clustering software.

EFT with HA means that you can achieve the following:

• Maintain availabilitythrough any planned or unplanned outage
• Increase network stability and flexibilityby implementing multiple nodes of EFT Enterprise for load balancing
• Meet important SLAs with enhanced throughput by deploying multiple nodes of EFT Enterprise to allow the collective EFT environment to efficiently use available resources
• Improve scalabilitywith the ability to share common configurations across nodes, eliminating the challenge of having multiple servers set up with different configurations

Meet your SLAs with EFT with High Availability today!Download a trial versionof EFT Enterprise to get started.