Given the constant and connected nature of software driven businesses, customers and users have grown to be less forgiving and more fickle with their attention. An outage in a single service can impact all of its users. An outage in a multi-tenant platform has an exponential impact as it impacts the users of all the individual service providers running their services on the platform.

Balancing preparedness

As enterprises look towards designing their disaster recovery solutions, it is easy to get focused on preventing the big disasters and outages.

Enterprises need to pay attention to determining, discovering and preventing these smaller outages that can occur more frequently. These small downtimes can add up over the course of a year and completely topple the service availability targets and goals.

Cost of small downtime events

The cost of such minor downtimes can easily add up. Frequent downtimes increase that likelihood that a larger number of users are impacted by the downtime.

Enterprises looking to develop a resiliency against both major and minor downtime events should focus on developing and maintaining the following capabilities:

• Continuous Backups

• Continuous Monitoring

• Failover

• Failback

 

It was also reported that 71% of respondents had experienced a downtime event in the last 12 months, with 41% reporting having experienced a downtime event in the last 3 months. This shows that downtimes are not only frequent but also expected, and thus require careful planning and design to not only mitigate but ensure speedy recovery and restoration of service.