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When Downtime Takes a Bite Out of Your Budget

When Downtime Takes a Bite Out of Your Budget

Delta Airlines recently had a major computer glitch that created massive delays for its travelers and serious headaches for its IT department. When they calculated it all up, they estimated that it cost them $150 million in pre-tax income.

When it comes to downtime, you need to ask yourself if you can even afford to lose access to your mission-critical resources and processes.

Systems can fail unexpectedly leaving you and your customers out in the cold. Unexpected system failure can also bring your operations to a screeching halt if your infrastructure lacks the capacity to accommodate. Something as simple as a spilled cup of coffee, or in Delta’s case, a power outage,  could leave you scrambling to recover your systems.

What's Uptime Really Worth? 

Even if downtime lasts only a few minutes, it can have wide-reaching ramifications for your business. The fallout can extend far beyond the downtime itself, with frustrated customers calling in to find out what happened.

Downtime can impact:

  • Mission-critical databases
  • Service-level agreements (SLAs)
  • File transfers and data backups
  • Equipment and other assets
  • Staff productivity and IT support resources
  • Legal and regulatory requirements
  • Business operations and opportunities
  • Brand reputation
  • Consumer confidence
  • Orders, call centers and customer service

In short, downtime is something that all businesses seek to avoid. To provide some perspective, Emerson Network Power issued a report that estimated that one minute of downtime costs organizations an estimated $8,851.

To counter the threat of downtime, many businesses set up system monitoring and have personnel in place to run reports, detect issues and investigate problems with network performance. They also need to keep network admins on-call to fix problems. The price tag of these approaches can add up quickly, and they often don't eliminate downtime altogether.

Maximize Your Availability

Globalscape EFT with High Availability (HA) and active-active clustering can protect your critical business processes and ensure that your crucial file transfer systems are “always on” so that 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 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 scalability with the ability to share common configurations across nodes, eliminating the challenge of having multiple servers set up with different configurations

Globalscape EFT'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 Globalscape EFT active-active deployment are put to work in production--with no standby hardware, and no clustering software.

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

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