Why Downtime Should Be Addressed by Your IT Services Provider in Santa Clara

Shorter downtime is one of the expectations companies have when they outsource to an IT services provider in Santa Clara. When most managed service providers (MSPs) promise to deliver at least 99% availability, this expectation is not unreasonable. In fact, some IT support service providers in Santa Clara offer high availability starting at three nines five (99.5%) and going up as high as four nines (99.99%).You'd think there isn't much difference among 99%, 99.5%, and 99.99%, but once you see the actual numbers, you'll realize that's not the case. An availability of 99.5% means a downtime of 1.83 days a year, while an availability of 99.99% means a downtime of only 52.60 minutes. As for 99%, it's so far behind at 3.65 days of downtime.

What is Downtime?

Simply defined, downtime refers to the time during which a system is unusable. The higher the availability, the lower the downtime. But no system has true 100% availability. Even the almost mythical nine nines (99.9999999%) availability is still not 100%.Also, downtimes can be scheduled or unscheduled. Scheduled downtimes are related to maintenance and upgrades, so they're usually included in the MSP's terms of service when delivering IT services in Santa Clara. The real problem is unscheduled downtime, which clients haven't prepared for. Though downtime can't be avoided completely, it should be minimized as much as possible.

How Does Downtime Affect Businesses?

Downtime can lead to all kinds of losses: lost sales, lost data, lost productivity, and lost trust. Let's take a theoretical situation to illustrate. If the online payment system of a retail company is down, opportunities for sales can't push through. Customers will just go to a competitor. If the downtime is caused by a breach, compromised data can furthermore breed distrust and drive away these customers for good. Downtime can also mean hours of idle time for employees. Orders can't be processed, so employees have nothing to do.A similar scenario already happened in real life. Retail giant Amazon lost up to $100 million in sales after only one hour of downtime on Prime Day. Your business may not be as big to lose as much, but that should give you enough perspective on how serious downtimes are.But though downtimes are costly, our IT services in Santa Clara are not. At Riverfy, we offer reasonable rates for our services, which include high availability support for your business. With more than two decades of experience to our name, we assure you that we have the equipment and expertise to back our promises. Contact us now for more information.