Internet outages have become one of the biggest issues for businesses across the world. Knowing that all of your data and activities need the Internet for your company to perform successfully, the idea of losing the Internet connection leads to imaging very bad scenarios.
Not being able to communicate with your customers and prospects, complete online transactions or any other vital operation will cost many businesses a significant amount of money. Also, internet outages result in customers losing trust in their favourite brand. When talking about homeowners, internet outage can also be a very frustrated and stressful experience but luckily, it doesn’t bring as nearly as severe problems for homeowners as it does for businesses.
To learn everything there is about this giant problem companies are hoping not to ever face, we bring you all you need to know about internet outages.
An Outage Happened… What Does That Mean?
When an internet outage happens to a business, it causes inconvenience to you, your entire staff, partners, customers and prospects. Anyone who wants to interact with your business during the internet outage will feel this inconvenience. An internet outage will affect probably every single aspect of your business and the longer it lasts, the bigger the problems it will create.
Such outages can decrease your revenue because you’ve lost a lot of your potential online sales during that time. Not to mention that your business being on hold also costs money. Internet outages harm your reputation as people will not be so enthusiast to interact with your brand once again after this storm passes. Those businesses who are storing their valuable data on some of the cloud options could also face data loss.
A lot of it is on the line and internet outages are merciless to companies, regardless of the reasons why they occurred in the first place. If you can’t imagine how big this damage might be, you should know that one hour of downtime can cost a small business around $8,000 and large enterprises around $700,000. Is there a way to prevent or ease this type of situations as some businesses can’t simply survive due to such high expenses?
The preparation starts with learning about internet outages and ways they happen in the first place. Regardless of how serious this threat is to a business, not many businesses will know the reasons for internet outages and what are the basic steps to prevent it.
Most Common Internet Outages
First thing you should know is there are planned and unplanned activities that lead to internet outages. The most common internet outages happen due to maintenance and upgrades. When there’s planned maintenance, it means it will be carried out by IT professionals who are either working in your company or are outsourced.
When it’s planned, they will try to minimize the impact this maintenance or upgrade will have on users by scheduling it when it’s the best time for your stuff and your users. In the case of unplanned maintenance, it’s usually a matter of urgency where the IT professionals need to fix a certain issue as soon as possible.
You can also have problems with your internet service provider. Your company may be unable to access the Internet because of your provider so while your other software applications continue to run completely smoothly, the ones that depend on your Internet connection will be unable to work. Also, you can have issues with only certain applications that might not work due to unknown reason but you need them to keep the business running.
Hardware failure is one of the common reasons for internet outages as well. Troubles with network servers can happen as your infrastructure ages. Having adequate backups should be a part of your strategy if you don’t want to lose your data.
Lastly, there are also malicious attacks. Your system could be attacked by a virus or any other type of malicious software designed to cause harm. Unfortunately, these type of attacks could cause a lot of damage to your company and it’s really hard to recover from it so it’s smart to keep your data backed up at all times.
Conclusion
Yes, internet outages can be caused by countless reasons and it might be terrifying even to think about it but you will need to do everything you can to protect your company. Starting from backing up your data to finding the best internet service provider on the market. Most importantly, you will need to be informed about all the ways internet outages actually happen to a company and see how they recover from it. In the end, it can happen to anybody, even to you.
