Downtime is money

Doug Barney at Progress looks at mitigating the costs and consequences of application downtime

The risks of application downtime and their potential impact on businesses go hand in hand with the explosive growth in application development.

Senseye’s True Cost Of Downtime Report reveals that unplanned downtime costs manufacturers at least 50 per cent more today than it did in the period 2019-20, due to inflation and production lines running at higher capacity. The cost of a lost hour now ranges from £32.9k for FMCG facilities to over £1.7m in the automotive sector. 

Unplanned downtime of internal or external-facing business applications can lead to serious challenges for business leaders in terms of lost productivity, reputational damage, lost sales and missed business opportunities. Moreover, hidden costs such as IT team resources and time only add to the overall impact. 

The costs of paralysed business operations are prompting smart IT pros and CFOs to demand greater uptime and performance, with enterprises aiming for 99.999 per cent uptime.

Knowing some of the ways to mitigate downtime risks is vital, including using load balancers as a solution to achieve high availability and eliminate unplanned downtime. 

Impacts of unplanned downtime 

Applications are critical for all business models in any industry. When applications fail, business operations are compromised and can even grind to a halt. This affects all stakeholders in the business’ ecosystem – from employees (including the C-suite), customers, prospects and business partners – who all expect the organisation’s applications and website to be available 24x7. This has an impact on lost productivity, as well as staff job functions and workflows. 

Ultimately, unplanned downtime means holding back business success on a variety of levels. In a retail context, any compromised user experience has a bearing on business success.  Downtime would translate to lost sales in terms of the impact on online shopping applications. 

But when apps are sluggish or fail to deliver, not only does this friction prevent business opportunities, transactions and customer journeys, it also impacts brand trust, potentially driving users to a competitor in just a few clicks. In fact, reputational damage is the greatest long-term cost to the organisation. 

Beyond the time impact on stakeholders, outages have massive cost implications in terms of IT response time, and business continuity, for instance shutdowns in manufacturing. The effects of downtime incidents also include hidden downtime costs, such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Website availability is critical to good search rankings. Google values consistent and available systems and punishes sites with downtime. 

Load balancers: key for business continuity

For a modern digital business, high availability of websites and applications is everything.  Although some of the historical methods for improving availability, such as clustering and virtualisation, have worked to an extent, tech teams are turning to the method of load balancing to mitigate downtime risks and build trust in availability of their apps.  

Load balancers play a critical role in distributing requests and, through monitoring and rerouting requests, they can avoid offline servers. Instead of directing a request, such as an application request to the same server every time, a load balancer first determines the ‘load’ on that server. If the server is busy with a load over the threshold set by IT, those requests are instead directed to a server with more availability. 

Load balancers are, in essence, servers and can be equipped with all kinds of applications, including security solutions. This also gives them the ability to mitigate hack attacks such as DDoS. 

A load balancer can ensure that all server connection requests pass a CAPTCHA security prompt. A load balancer demands this for each connection, including unauthenticated requests. The CAPTCHA blocks cyber-criminals from overwhelming an IT infrastructure, such as a web server, with requests. Instead, these bogus and voluminous requests are intercepted by the load balancer and done away with when their CAPTCHA authentication is denied.  

The potential of load balancers is best illustrated at scale with a pool of backend application servers, which can be either physical, virtual or run as microservices in containers. With load balancers managing access to such a pool of application servers, and blocking and mitigating DDoS and other hack attacks, unplanned downtime is stamped out for on-premises applications. 

Going even further with Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB), which keeps applications available during a disaster, IT can now load balance services and applications across geographically spread data centres. Even if a major data location is taken offline by an extreme cyber-criminal attack or disaster software stays running. 

Greater uptime for greater performance 

Downtime is undeniably a business risk, and a huge cost to business. Even what’s called lowtime, or low performance, can have a similar impact, merely in lesser measure. As business leaders have realised the direct impact of downtime on customer experience and loyalty, there is growing importance of addressing and mitigating application downtime risks. 

Given their availability ambitions, high availability solutions such as load balancers, are the only viable option for eliminating unplanned downtime and its escalating associated costs, while improving business continuity and boosting performance. 

Doug Barney is a Tech Evangelist at Progress

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com