High Availability:Finding the Right Strategy for Your Business

How much network downtime can your company take?

You probably answered: “None”

Everyone does

Well what does “none” actually mean?

More importantly, how

much will “none” cost?

F A C T

Your IT hardware is going to fail

The ways in which it can fail is almost limitless

Some threats can be mitigated.

Some can’t.

Some would be way to expensive.

Something is going to take you down eventually

Make peace with it.

Then make a plan that

minimizes the damage

But before you start shopping, ask your self the all important

question:

Is there an actual business problem to solve?

What impact would an outage have on your company’s ability

to do business?

Would it be catastrophic?

Or a minor annoyance?

This should be the starting point for any discussion around an

availability strategy

Let’s consider a small real-estate

company with a few remote offices

around the country

How would an outage impact their business?

In this case, the employees only rely on the network for a few

tasks

So what happens if the network goes down?

Employees can check email and make calls on their cell

phones till operations are restored

Inconvenient? You bet

Business impacting problem? Not really

Restoring business operations by the next day should be more than adequate for this scenario.

What about the other end of the spectrum?

Let’s imagine a global call center where

500 agents receive calls 24/7

If the IP telephony or the call agent applications are not

available….

…the business stops

…the business stops

and so does the

revenue

The potential lost revenue of an outage serves as a guide

for how much you should spend to mitigate a potential

outage

Protip:

This keeps you from getting blinded by the light and

spending on availability you don’t need.

The remedy should

never be worse

than the affliction

So how much availability do you need? It completely depends on the cost of

downtime.

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