Almost all types of businesses from across diverse industry verticals are now heavily dependent on Information Technology. While many companies have their own in-house staff to manage servers and maintain systems, quite a few are utilizing the services of third party agencies specializing in IT services and cloud hosting as they lack the tools and specialized expertise needed to run their IT systems smoothly and efficiently.

Businesses are increasingly using cloud-based solutions in many key areas. While the internet has brought numerous benefits to enterprises, there are a few downsides too of being excessively dependent on technology.
One such problem that can put your business on the backfoot is downtime. Research shows that most companies have to endure this frustration every week resulting is substantial and direct losses. The worst part is that non-availability of business can quickly erode customer trust – a key component for success of any kind of business.

How Downtimes Can Cause Huge Businesses Losses

Downtime presents a huge challenge to customer retention and can prove to be a major barrier to top-line growth. That’s why it is important to ensure high availability of your business website and this must be incorporated into your cloud strategy for best outcomes.

The best hosting services provide 99% service availability which translates to some amount of inevitable downtime every week. Even guaranteed 99.9% uptime means that your business will suffer approximately nine hours of downtime per year. While this might not seem much, if the downtimes are suffered during peak business hours, the losses can be substantial.

Your business must find a way of ensuring high availability and that’s possible only when you have an availability strategy in place. Your business is more likely to be offline for longer periods of time without a high availability strategy and the consequences can be more severe than you think. Here are a few reasons why you must focus on high availability and why it is so critical for the future of your business.

- It will do your reputation a world of good and help acquire a reliable brand image.
- High availability may improve application performance in some cases and help boost sales conversions and productivity 
- It can mitigate the risk of data loss
- Maintenance events can be planned better and customer impact reduced 
- Data replication used as part of a high availability implementation strategy can boost data backup strategies

Why Multi-Faceted Approach Is The Best Way Ahead

It is indeed possible to develop highly-available infrastructure for companies of all sizes and industry verticals. Experts are of the opinion that adopting just one policy or solution is not enough and does not really guarantee full protection. Using a multi-faceted approach is definitely a better move. Make sure you incorporate the best industry practices and use proven solutions that incorporate redundancy and ensures protection of existing infrastructure of your enterprise.

It is important to use a scalable system to run your business applications. When you do that, the concerns regarding high fixed costs and low usage is not there. You are assured that the service can manage spikes or increases in traffic as your usage grows. An elastic solution can properly fit the size of your organization, and automatically evolves with you as your needs change over time.

Load Balancing – A Practical Solution

Another way of ensuring high availability is to use load balancing. You can distribute your traffic between multiple web or application servers smoothly with load balancers. The application server becomes the single point of failure, and provides a scalable architecture. Large volumes of traffic in the form of user requests can be easily handled by the scalable server. The system also provides DDoS protection and application firewalls. The end result is that companies can keep serving the needs of their customers even in the instance of a malicious attack happening.

There are other practical options available for ensuring high visibility. One is to maximize use of redundancy for an application through the process of replication and failover servers. High availability implementation processes must also be fused seamlessly with disaster recovery and backup strategies. This can ensure speed and top performance consistently.

By creating a strategy of high availability, businesses can ensure that their customers are served better at all times and with a high degree of consistency. It is another way of saying that they are valued and their contribution is important. A highly available infrastructure also means that all negative impact caused by outages can be eliminated, if not mitigated. Small businesses can take solace from the fact that high availability will not burn a big hole in their pockets as scalable cloud-based services can be bought at competitive prices.