Why limiting IS downtime is strategic
Breakdown, hacking, fire, human error... the causes of information system (IS) information system (IS) are manifold. They can have a major impact on a company's activity, by slowing down or interrupting production, services or customer relations.
In periods of high activity (seasonality, campaigns...), even short even short-term unavailability can lead to significant losses, both in economic terms and in terms of brand image. It is therefore crucial toanticipate these risks to accelerate recovery and guarantee business continuity.
Calculating the cost of a stop: an essential prerequisite
Before taking any action, it is essential to evaluate the cost of an IS shutdown. This includes :
- The loss of productivity of teams,
- The loss of revenue (orders, services, sales...),
- The hours devoted to problem-solving or rescheduling tasks,
- Visit unexpected costs equipment replacement or repair,
- The damage to reputation and potential loss of customers.
Once these impacts have been quantified, management will be more inclined to support preventive measures.
5 measures to implement
1. Train employees
In many cases, human error is the main cause service interruptions: mishandling, clicking on a malicious link, incorrect configuration...
It is therefore crucial to :
- Train business users recognize common threats (phishing, ransomware, etc.),
- Raise awareness of good security practices,
- Document internal procedures to facilitate diagnosis and intervention,
- Organize ongoing training for IT teamsteams, to reinforce their ability to respond rapidly to incidents.
2. Set up a backup strategy
The regular backup of information systems is an obvious... and often neglected. To be effective, it must be based on several principles:
- Redundancy local backups + cloud (external, resilient storage),
- Regular recovery tests to check data integrity and recovery time,
- Differentiation between snapshot and backup A snapshot does not replace a real backup,
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) evaluation For maximum acceptable data loss.
A well thought-out backup strategy is a key key to IT resilience.
3. Check the SLAs of your suppliers and partners
Your cloud suppliers, outsourcing providers or hosting companies play a central role in the availability of your IS. It is essential to :
- Review and challenge their SLAs (Service Level Agreements),
- Identify the GTR (Guaranteed Recovery Time) maximum time to restore service,
- Check the GTI (Guaranteed Intervention Time) : commitment time to take charge,
- Ensure that contractual commitments are realistic and measurable.
These elements must be aligned with your business objectives and your level of criticality.
4. Switch to active-active clustering
The active-active clustering allows loads to be distributed between several active nodes or servers, unlike the active-passive model model, in which backup systems remain inactive until a failure occurs.
The benefits:
- Reduction of single points of failure,
- Load balancing between servers to absorb peaks,
- Automatic scales in case of failure without service interruption.
It's a robust solution for companies with high availability high availability.
5. Set up a load balancing infrastructure
L'load balancing allows you to intelligently distribute network flows or application requests over several servers or environments.
Why it matters:
- For absorb traffic peaks (e.g.: product launches, sales...),
- To guarantee fluidity of business services,
- To ensure horizontal scalability scalability.
Combined with clustering, this architecture considerably enhances IS resilience.
A IS downtime is never insignificant. It generates direct costs, disrupts operations and can undermine customer relations.
By adopting these 5 measures - training, backup, SLA verification, clustering and balancing - companies can significantly reduce risk, limit interruptions and strengthen business continuity.
Need help assessing the resilience of your information system? Our experts can help you build a strategy tailored to your needs.
