What Downtime Actually Costs and How to Avoid It

Key Takeaways

• Businesses need to be prepared in the face of network outages or risk financial consequences, reputational damages, and data loss. 
• Ensuring uptime and business continuity requires tackling legacy systems, keeping systems up to date, implementing strong security measures, and creating disaster recovery plans. 
• 99.99% uptime, or “four-nines”, is possible with Liferay’s HA+ add-on subscription. This will help you reduce downtime to a maximum of 52.56 minutes per year through a higher SQL tier and dual-region set up for cloud storage.

Last July’s Crowdstrike global outage left many organizations scrambling to get their services back up and running. The largest IT outage in history has been said to cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses, and this doesn’t even include damage to brand reputation and customer trust. 

And IT and business professionals believe it’s only a matter of time before another major incident. So how can you ensure that your business is prepared and can keep your applications up and running? 
 

What Does Downtime Cost? 

A study found that 91% of organizations experience at least one network outage per quarter, which can cause their online applications to go down. And according to recent research, the average cost of downtime has reached as high as $9,000 per minute for large organizations. 

But monetary losses aren’t the only costs associated with downtime. Every second your website, portal, commerce site, or other business-critical application is down can contribute to lost revenue, damaged reputation, compromised data, and the erosion of customer trust. Downtime can even affect employee morale, as these incidents are disruptive to team productivity and often cause communication breakdowns.

But in a recent survey of 1,000 IT and business executives, 86% revealed that they’ve been prioritizing security at the expense of readiness for service disruptions. Although security is definitely critical to business continuity, these leaders have realized that they must also be proactive about disruption preparedness. 

 How to Keep Your Solutions Up and Running 

Keeping your solutions operational is incredibly important. Here are four ways you can ensure the performance of your solutions:

1. Tackle the main causes of downtime. Perhaps one of the most common factors contributing to downtime is legacy systems. Because many legacy systems have outdated hardware and have reached their end of life, they’re often unable to keep up with the demands of modern business needs, especially around data. As data volumes grow, these legacy systems may experience performance bottlenecks that degrade system performance and availability, ultimately increasing the risk of your solutions going down. 

2. Keep software and systems up to date. Along the same lines, keeping the systems you use updated is crucial for patching vulnerabilities, improving performance, and preventing unexpected failures. Monitor and maintain your systems to help identify and address potential issues before they cause downtime. 
3. Implement strong security measures. Vulnerable systems can also be a reason for downtime. Prevent cyberthreats and attacks that could cause downtime with firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Regular testing for vulnerabilities and potential failure points also will help identify issues before they can become causes for downtime.
4. Create a disaster recovery and backup plan. If downtime does happen, developing a comprehensive plan that outlines the steps needed to recover systems and get them back online is essential. Additionally, implementing redundant systems, like a backup server, ensures that these can take over if necessary. 

Is "Four Nines" Availability Really Achievable? 

Although 100% uptime may not be possible, many organizations have aimed to hit a 99.99% uptime, also known as “four nines.” This translates to a maximum of 52.56 minutes of downtime per year. 

But how can you reach “four nines”? 

Liferay now offers an HA+ add-on subscription for our Liferay PaaS customers to receive 99.99% uptime, ensuring greater availability while also boosting application performance. This is possible through: 

Higher CloudSQL Tier 

Our HA+ add-on subscription runs on the highest tier of Google's CloudSQL service. This allows us to give customers access to higher availability, ensuring a 99.99% uptime. Additionally, customers get access to performance-optimized hardware that, on a standard size, comes with double the RAM (32GB) plus 375GB of ultra-fast data cache storage. The impact on response times is perceptible, with average query processing time 3x faster in a sample benchmark test.* 

Dual-Region Setup for Cloud Storage 

The Google Cloud Storage (GCS) underneath your solution will have a dual-region configuration, ensuring your backups and Documents & Media library files will have higher availability.

But if an issue arises or downtime ever exceeds the SLA, Liferay will offer credits based on how long applications are down.

With Liferay HA+, reaching “four nines” is not only possible, but the entire infrastructure management is handled by the Liferay team, so you can focus on managing your applications and depend on the experts to keep your infrastructure up and running for longer.
 

Ensuring Performance with Liferay HA+

Want to guarantee higher availability for your solutions? Visit liferay.com/contact-sales to get started! 

*Benchmark test data available upon request. Contact [email protected] for more information.