How to Protect Your Organization from the High Cost of Downtime

The airline industry was reminded again recently that technology is critical to day to day operations. Earlier this month, a system-wide computer outage at Delta Air Lines caused the cancelation of more than 2,100 flights and delayed countless more. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded around the globe, as the outage took a few days to completely sort out.

The computer outage was later reported to have been caused by an internal outage followed by the failure of a backup system to take over when the main computer system failed. All told, this episode will probably cost Delta millions and millions of dollars in lost business.

Events like these bring into focus the need for thorough disaster recovery plans that can rely on “always on” systems. There is only so much that can be controlled, especially with unpredictable weather patterns, power outages, or human error, among many other variables. Despite our need for networks and computer systems to be “always on,” it’s unrealistic to assume that they will be. So, how can your organization minimize the damage of an outage and plan for serious problems before they occur?

Assess Your Risk

How can you assess the true cost of system downtime? The best way to do so is to by understanding the business cost if your data does not reach its destination. Do you have SLAs in place with customers, vendors or business partners? Will business critical services be cancelled, delayed, or will service be otherwise interrupted? Certainly Delta’s case is a severe one, because it was so widespread and frustrating for customers, not to mention the heavy media scrutiny the outage received.

However, as IDC detailed in a 2015 report, even a less public system outage can have an enormous price tag for a Fortune 1000 company. Take a look:

• $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion is the average total cost per year for unplanned application downtime
• $100,000 per hour on average for the cost of an infrastructure failure
• $500,000 to $1 million per hour is the average cost of a critical application failure  

Maximize Your Availability

Globalscape EFT’s High Availability (HA) solution with active-active clustering can protect your critical business processes and ensure that your crucial file transfer systems are “always on” and employees, customers and business partners experience seamless availability of critical applications and information, even during periods of uncertainty or crisis.

Globalscape EFT with HA means that you can minimize your downtime risks and achieve the following:

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

How does high availability with Globalscape EFT work?

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

Can your organization afford downtime? Download a trial version of Globalscape EFT to get started today.