Technology and Business Uptime

Beach Communications was recently asked to serve as a marketing resource for Financial Executives International.  We are glad to help and look forward to making a difference with your organization.

Beach Communications is a marketing firm.  We use the principles of advertising, direct marketing, events, interactive, training, sales promotion and public relations to impact human behavior. 

In the last several years, much of our work has become technology enabled – websites, search engine marketing, e-commerce, social networks, and newsletters.  Through this day-to-day contact with technology, we’ve been exposed to a reality that impacts companies of all shapes and sizes across all functional areas – the need for constant availability of data.

A very small amount of “downtime” for a company’s IT systems can impact operations, revenue, reputation, and damage business relationships.  Even if a company keeps its IT systems up and running 99.9 percent of the time, that still means nearly nine hours of downtime per year.

Downtime can be caused by hardware, operating system, data storage, network, or application program errors, over which a company has some control, and the weather, over which companies have little control.

Modern, state-of-the-art data centers now exist with 100% uptime. 

Companies can minimize the chances of downtime and lost business by locating their critical systems in data centers that have true N+1 (or higher) redundancy or higher for all critical systems, including power, networking, cooling, and security, with no single points of failure in the data center.

Severe weather problems that can cause prolonged periods of downtime in the United States include earthquakes in the west, hurricanes and severe flooding along the gulf coast, severe snow and ice storms in the northeast, tornadoes in the midwest, and wild fires in the west.

Interestingly, Michigan is one of the few states which enjoy the status of never having had a FEMA-rated natural disaster.

If your business is investing in technology to enable your business processes, we recommend that that you also invest in housing your data in centers located in a disaster-free state, and one that is constructed with redundancies for power, networking, cooling, and all critical systems. 

To contact us for more information about data hosting, please click here.