How to Reduce IT Downtime

Reducing IT downtime is critical to ensuring smooth business operations, minimizing productivity loss, and preventing financial damage. By adopting monitoring tools, regular maintenance, and automated incident response systems, organizations can significantly cut down on unplanned outages and recovery time.

To improve cross-department collaboration and prevent IT system downtime, establish clear lines of responsibility and a well-defined plan that addresses the root causes of downtime. Equally important is ensuring that each team understands their specific responsibilities and how to implement solutions to address these causes effectively. 

"It's essential to recognize that quick response to outages depends on having clear communication channels and effective collaboration between operations and security teams," says Derek Ashmore, application transformation principal at Asperitas Consulting, in an email interview.

Active IT practices are essential for minimizing downtime and maintaining system resilience, says Ashmore. "Automating infrastructure changes and application deployments is key to reducing human error."

It's equally important to automate testing for infrastructure and application changes as much as possible. Ashmore suggests implementing real-time monitoring of telemetry data through security information and event management (SIEM) tools to actively identify issues and threats. 

Related:Outages Cost Companies Millions — Here's How to Avoid Them

He also recommends regular incident response drills, such as chaos engineering, which introduces faults to test system resilience.

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