How do we reduce the amount of time our systems are down?

The short answer to this week’s question is simple: get better systems. But before you kick me or groan out loud, let me give you some metrics, some causes and some strategies for getting a better result.

Metrics

I’m often asked, ‘What can we reasonably expect of PCs and servers, and how much should we put up with?’

This is a question of quality of equipment and maintenance. With good equipment reasonably maintained in a standard office environment, you should only need to re-boot a PC very occasionally (certainly less than once a week, assuming you shut it down each night – which extends life, reduces power consumption and lessens environmental impact). Once a month would be more desirable – if at all.

For a server, re-boots should be scheduled events for necessary upgrades, and your downtime should be almost none. These days, server uptime of 99.9% and above is considered reasonable for a small business. In a corporate environment the ideal is 99.999% (five nines) uptime, but that is too expensive for most small companies. If you achieve 99.9% uptime, that implies that 0.1% of the time your server may be down (over a year, this equals about 8.5 hours).

Causes

Aging IT equipment – or as we call it, ‘creaking infrastructure’ – is more likely to falter. This can be caused by a number of things: moving parts in hard drives, wear and tear to cooling fans and dust collecting inside various devices. Electronic boards and connections also seem to suffer from degraded performance.

Other causes include:

• Fragmentation of data on hard drives leads to reduced read write activity, and increases the workload for the drives (which increases failure rates).
• File corruption by viruses and other forms of data degradation leads to reduced computer performance.
• Updating patches from software vendors is a double-edged sword, as solutions to known problems have been known to cause new unanticipated problems. This requires a carefully managed process of testing patches before deployment to assist with stable performance.

In small businesses, accountability for proactive management is also often an issue. Unfortunately, it is one of those jobs that we all intend to get to, but run out of time to do because it does not pop up on our list of urgent or important daily tasks.

This lack of proactive work leaves your team members constantly putting out fires, and fixing broken computers, rather than enjoying stability and performance.

Strategies

To get on top of IT in small business, it is important to have a strategic plan that outlines where IT fits into the needs of the business. This will give you the ability to set realistic budgets for IT infrastructure, software systems and ongoing maintenance; and allow you to assign resources to the task or hire the right skills to get the work done to a suitable standard.

Once you have the clarity to assign a budget, your priority is to determine the most valuable functionality and get that working. An investment in infrastructure is essential, as you can’t build stable systems on creaking infrastructure. Consider finance if cash is out of the question. Good vendor finance is often available at favourable rates from large companies like Cisco and HP.

Once you have a stable platform, maintain it proactively to get the best performance out of it.

Then you can implement timesaving productivity, creating applications to drive your success. There are systems for just about every industry, ranging from service delivery, manufacturing, production management, document management and medical practice management. For architects, plumbers, handymen, lawyers, doctors and so on, there are productivity systems that make it easier to deal with more work and more clients. There are also marketing and communication tools that can increase your reach and help you compete globally.

As with most things, it all starts with a plan…

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