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When you have an IT (Information Technology) outage or disruption, your operations screech to a halt. These issues are entirely unpredictable — you never know when they will happen. These outages are more than just inconvenient — they’re incredibly costly in a multitude of ways. Depending on the scale of your business and its reliance on IT services, the combined costs of these incidents could be anywhere from hundreds of dollars to millions.

IT outages affect your business by:

• Costing valuable employee time troubleshooting the issue, in addition to overtime or contractor costs, depending on your situation
• Preventing employees from performing essential tasks
• Missing out on revenue opportunities
• Hurting your brand reputation by appearing unreliable
• Frustrating users and customers

Even if your IT outage lasts just a few minutes, it can still hurt your business. In fact, in a 2015 study, reported that 45 percent of IT professionals said business is negatively impacted if an outage lasts just 15 minutes or less.

IT outages happen to businesses of all scales. In the past year, there have been some widely reported outages at major airlines like Delta, Southwest, and United. For example, the Delta outage last year grounded 2,300 flights over three days and cost $150 million. But what can small to medium-sized business owners learn from these high-profile outages?

Lessons Learned from Major IT Incidents

Even though these outages cost millions and affected major corporations, businesses of all sizes can learn a thing or two from these events.

1. Be proactive. Don’t wait until it’s too late to protect your technological assets. An outage can happen any time — and often, at the worst times — so be prepared for these events.
2. Back up data regularly. How often does your most important data change? Every hour? Or every week? The frequency of your data backups should reflect that.
3. Don’t leave your systems vulnerable to a single point of failure. A single point of failure should not be enough to disrupt your entire system. Build redundancies and identify any faults in your system — you need to catch them before they can spread.
4. Have a clear-cut emergency plan. Communication is vital when outages occur. Sixty percent of IT professionals said it took 15 minutes or more to find the right person to respond to an outage, and almost half of those surveyed said it took as long or longer to find the right person than to fix the issue itself. Avoid this trap and clearly outline each person’s roles and responsibilities for when an incident occurs. Write a step by step process for how to respond to these events, and make sure all team members are aware. Implementing a disaster recovery and business recovery plan before emergencies happen ensures you’re prepared for anything.

How to Minimize IT Outages and Disruptions

In addition to the lessons outlined above, you can minimize IT outages and risks by taking advantage of professional IT solutions. TuiSpace offers various managed server solutions to protect your system from IT outages and disruptions. With affordable hourly rates, we serve clients locally in the Houston area or remotely worldwide.

Benefits of IT Management Services

Outsourcing your IT needs to TuiSpace’s team of experts lowers your IT costs by eliminating the need for multiple full-time IT staffers that come with the heavy costs of hiring, training, salaries, and benefits. With TuiSpace on your side, you can cut costs while receiving IT help from trained and experienced IT professionals exactly when you need it.

On top of that, using our management services slashes the downtime your operations may experience during outages or incidents. We put processes in place so you will never waste time trying to figure out who to contact if something goes awry. This leads to an overall increase in productivity for your team and operations, and fewer and shorter outages for your IT. You can spend your time and energy on your business operations rather than being distracted by complex IT issues. We focus on keeping your IT so you can focus on running your business.

How We Help Small to Medium Sized Businesses

TuiSpace offers an array of managed IT and server solutions to businesses in the Houston area and beyond. This is what we can do for your SMB IT:

• System configurations and installs
• Proactive management of desktops, servers, and networks
• Network administration
• Disaster recovery planning and business continuing planning through backups, audits, and stress tests
• Cloud services
• Email services
• Security including malware cleanups, vulnerability testing, and more
• Website work like migrations and server configurations

Interested in our managed IT solutions for your business? Click here to read more about our services. Our hourly rates are transparent and affordable — we charge $80/hour for administrative server tasks, and $100/hour for security work. With our team, you know exactly what you’re getting. If you have an IT issue that needs immediate attention, call us at 281.940.8135 or email info@tuispace.com.