Downtime and inefficient IT systems are two of the biggest challenges that not for profits face. A poor IT system will affect your staffs productivity, not to mention annoy them a lot! If you need to call your IT company too regularly, you might want to consider looking at some ways to improve your systems and minimise downtime.
So why is minimising downtime important to your organisation?
- Downtime reduces productivity. Every hour down is an hour you cannot help a client.
- Downtime has the potential for lost data. IT system crashes can cause data loss.
- Downtime affects overall IT efficiency. If one of your systems goes down, generally everything is affected.
In this blog post, I’ll help you discover six ways an IT provider can help minimise downtime. Use these tips to minimise downtime and create a more productive environment for your staff.
Here are the six ways:
- Invest in the right solutions
- Look to cloud computing
- Engage a proactive managed service provider
- Have a disaster recovery and backup strategy
- Appropriate redundancy
- Warranties
1. Invest in the right solutions
The first way you can minimise downtime is to invest in the right solutions. NFPs are spoilt for choice when it comes to IT, and sometimes it gets the best of us. Choosing the right solution for your organisation is critical. By making smart decisions early, you will minimise downtime in the long run.
2. Cloud computing
Leverage cloud computing with software and infrastructure wherever possible. Cloud providers will deliver better uptime than what you will be able to do with your local IT environment.
Why? Because they have industry leading equipment, software, and technical skills. They specialise in IT and hire the best people to ensure it is always running smoothly.
See what areas of your IT network you can move to the cloud. Even if you start with just the basic things such as email and Microsoft Office. Opting to take a hybrid cloud approach early on will give your organisation a good taste of the better uptime that can be achieved through the cloud.
3. Engage a managed services provider that is proactive
You can minimise downtime by using a managed services provider who proactively monitors your systems. If they are proactive about attending to problems before they become big issues, they will actually be able to minimise (or eliminate) the amount of downtime.
This is one of the biggest benefits of using a managed service provider (MSP). Unlike traditional ad hoc IT providers where you pay by the hour, MSPs charge a flat monthly fee. This is great for you because you can pass on all your IT responsibilities to them. They will have a vested interest in keeping your systems running smoothly and limiting problems because they are charging a flat fee.
They want to minimise IT problems and increase IT efficiency so they can run their own business. How will they turn a profit if they’re out fixing your IT problems every other day?
4. Have a disaster recovery and backup strategy
The fourth way you can minimise downtime is by having an appropriate disaster recovery and backup solution. Do you have a solution that can recover data in the event of a system failure? What about backups of your data? How are you doing that?
These are questions you need to ask your IT firm to make sure that they have systems in place to handle these unforeseeable circumstances.
Make sure your solution has the appropriate Recovery Point Objective (maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
5. Redundancy
Redundancy describes computer or network system components that are installed to back up primary resources in case they fail. For local IT environments, it might be solutions built into your own infrastructure. For cloud solutions, it will be mostly your internet - since you need the internet to access all your cloud services.
What do you have in place if suddenly your servers crash? What about if your internet goes down? Do you have a backup connection?
You need redundancy plans to ensure that if something does go down, you can get back up and running as quickly as possible.
Your organisation is probably already strapped for time and the last thing you want is to be twiddling your thumbs waiting to access your systems!
6. Warranties
Make sure the equipment you buy has the appropriate warranties. I recommend going with brand name equipment - think big names such as HP or Dell. They offer different types of warranties tailored to your needs. There are three hour warranties, next business day warranties, and more. The warranties are based on response times they give you to replace the hardware.
Warranties should be a business decision - if a server fails, how quickly do you need a replacement? Can you wait until the next business day, or do you need it fixed within a few hours?
If your server falls over and you don’t have a redundancy, you’re probably going to be down for the amount of time it will take for the replacement to arrive and get installed.
Better IT systems will minimise downtime
Downtime and slow IT systems should be a thing of the past. No longer is it good enough for your organisation to be constantly slowing down and affecting the whole team’s productivity.
Talk to your IT firm about the solutions I’ve discussed today. Make sure you look at your IT system and ensure you have the right solutions in place to minimise downtime.
It comes down to how much you value your staff's productivity. Can you afford to be down more than three hours every month? How much will that cost your organisation in productivity.
These are the sorts of things you should think about.