Business Continuity Planning for Your Critical Workflows

Downtime is no longer unavoidable with active-active high-availability solutions

Business managers know that providing their employees with constant, seamless access to their company’s data and applications is critical to success. Downtimes carry significant costs, including lost IT and employee productivity, business disruption, and lost revenue. These costs are on the rise, amounting to an average of $67,651 per hour for high-priority applications, with the average outage being 117 minutes, just a few minutes short of two hours1.

Therefore, organizations must ensure that their file transfer solutions are protected against UPS system failure, human error, cybercrime, and severe weather. For file transfer solutions, High Availability configurations are an attractive option. This design relies on active-active clustering to make use of multiple servers that are always running and ready to take on the workload of another server should it fail or get overloaded.

With HA clustering, the response to an equipment problem is automatic and immediate. Load balancers constantly monitor the system, halting additional requests from being sent to servers that can’t respond. From an end-user perspective, the result is seamless, reliable performance. Employees don’t have to be interrupted when servers encounter difficulties – they can just get on with their business as usual.

The goal of any network system is to offer constant uptime. With HA active-active configurations, the result is 99.999 percent availability, which means less than 5 minutes of actual downtime over the course of a year.

In today’s interconnected, technology-saturated world, digital resources are more central to business operations than ever before. Company leaders must ask themselves how long they can afford to be offline. Experiencing days, hours, or even minutes of downtime no longer needs to be a fact of life. Instead, file transfer solutions with HA active-active clustering enable IT teams, executives, and employees to have the peace of mind that their system will always keep running and offer consistent, dependable performance.

1Source: Veeam Study