Worried Of Getting Knocked Out With An Outage? Here’s Your Way Out

Nilesh Rane
Associate Vice President, Product & Services, Netmagic

“43% of companies experiencing disasters never re-open, and 29% close within two years,” reports consulting firm McGladrey and Pullen. A Gartner study warns, “40% of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours.”

These are scary statistics. Many companies globally have gone through terrible times and have learned the after-shocks of disaster and outages the hard way.

Take for instance the recent 3-day outage at a leading global smartphone and mobile telephony company. The outage first affected users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and then spread to the US and India, crippling communication. While the service has been fully restored around the world, the damage has been done: The outage has hit consumers’ addiction to the smartphone with a vengeance. And it left many wondering if this could be the death knell for the company’s stronghold on business.

This company has worked 12 years to win the trust of 70 million subscribers. Now, post this outage, it will have to fully commit to win that trust back.The company’s concerns may lie not only with angry consumers, but with disgruntled companies too.

Now talk about a leading e-commerce website in India, which was down for more than an hour in late September, thus crippling its services that cater to millions of people in India.

Then, disaster struck at a leading global IT infrastructure services provider in early August. This outage was brought about by a lightning strike, which knocked this company’s European cloud services offline. The strike caused a transformer explosion and fire in the grid of this company’s electricity supplier, and the same strike also knocked out its backup generators. Call that a double whammy.Some customers faced this outage for up to two days.

And by the way, this was not the first time this company’s services were affected due to an outage. In fact, it was the second time within a span of a few months. And ironically, what angered some customers the most was that while their sites were offline for the best part of the day the outage struck, the service provider’s main UK site functioned throughout!

In a world where uncertainties abound, the importance of such outages and other disasters that can hit your IT systems cannot be discounted. The problem is that you cannot bet on never experiencing a service outage or a natural disaster. It isn’t a practical choice. You just read the stats, right?

Anyways, even in the face of the most crippling of outages, mission critical and business critical services must continue to meet their availability expectations. The chance of losing data (and business) increases with the severity of the outage and it is imperative for business continuity to have the means and methods in place to ensure the continuity of IT infrastructure in the event of any disaster.

But what can you do to avoid an outage?
You can’t expect to hold off solving the problems of your clients in case an outage strikes your IT systems. That will be like taking them for granted.

But what are you doing to prepare for an eventuality like this? Of course your managed or cloud service provider will give you an assurance that your data and systems will be protected during any outage of any magnitude, we have lessons in front of us that such promises don’t generally stand true in case of a black swan event, like a lightning strike on your vendor’s power grid as well as its power generators.

One way to survive such outages and come out without a major dent to your business’s image is to build in extra resilience by way of having a backup system. But this comes at a big cost, and thus may not be the most viable route to avoid all outages.

What then?
What about tying with a service provide that provides that extra safety to your IT systems?

Get the Netmagic Advantage
Outages are part of life, and you need to get used to hearing about them occurring every now and then. But there’s a way to make your own IT systems safe by using the services of a provider that has one of the best track records in terms of keeping clients’ data safe and secure and their systems running even when disasters have struck in the past.

Netmagic is one of India’s leading managed services, cloud services, and disaster recovery services provider. The company also provides services like Internet Datacenter & Managed Hosting, Infrastructure Management, Managed Security, Application Hosting, and Messaging & Collaboration.

With Netmagic’s solid disaster recovery plan and robust data centers in place, you can keep your systems running smoothly even in the face of the biggest disasters, thus protecting your business against unpredictable losses. Netmagic offers its clients security against natural disasters as well as systemic ones like accidental deletion of critical data or a system failure on a massive scale.

This means you can respond in a systematic, non-chaotic manner to a disaster, restore the integrity of your hardware, software and data and resume system operations fast. It also minimizes any damage to your reputation.

So aren’t Netmagic and its clients also vulnerable to the unseen and unpredictable outages like the ones we just talked about above?

No, if we go by past experience. Netmagic’s data centers saw an outage on July 26th, 2005, the day Mumbai received its worst rainfall ever. But even then, the outage was reversed and clients’ systems were restored to normal functioning within 5 minutes.

Netmagic provides unmatched SLAs, highly scalable infrastructure, and availability to its clients and that’s the reason it has long standing relationships with many of them.

After getting to know the real cost of an outage to your business and revenue, you will quickly realize the importance of having a robust and redundant IT set up and turning to solid third party vendors like Netmagic providing professional and reliable managed internet datacenter services including disaster recovery services.

You will get benefits such as near 100% uptime, efficient disaster recovery and business continuity, elastic bandwidth and smooth running of mission critical application, all at a fraction of the cost of running an in-house data center facility.

So what are you waiting for? An outage?
Before it can strike you, secure your data and IT systems with Netmagic.