Nowadays, your business depends on having a constant, uninterrupted access to the internet, much more so than in the past. Every minute your company spends offline, without access to crucial information, is not only a wasted minute, but also a very expensive one.

What can be done to counteract and defend against internet outages? The options for reducing downtime are many, and although none of them are free, one must consider just how expensive internet downtime is.

Of course, organisations must determine what their own cost for internet outages is, as this cost differs greatly from company to company. Smaller companies will find that given their smaller workforce, the cost of internet downtime hours is smaller than that for larger companies, but this is not the only measure. Certain companies can revert to manual processing and can therefore continue to function at reasonable levels when certain systems are unavailable, but companies such as online retailers, marketing companies, communications companies and others simply cannot conduct any business during internet downtime. In addition, a number of our systems today are tightly integrated and dependent upon internet access. For example, while employees will obviously not be able to surf the web, they will also not be able to access e-mail and, possibly, if using a VOIP system, even phones might be down. If most of your communication happens using the internet, there is simply no way to fall back to more traditional methods.

The remedial efforts required to repair the damage of unforeseen and unplanned for internet outages are also not inconsequential. For example, employees might have to work overtime and, if customer satisfaction was damaged, a costly bridge-mending program may be necessary to win back these customers’ faith and trust.

The cost of downtime reduction solutions tend to spiral out of control the closer a solution comes to promising near-zero downtime.

The best way to make a rational and business case-based decision on the appropriate level of investment in internet availability solutions is primarily to have a thorough understanding of the financial impact and exposure that any internet downtime has on the organisation’s bottom line.

That said, there is another way. Redundant connections, although prohibitively priced for the domestic and enterprise customer, are a matter-of-fact requirement for companies that provide data centre or cloud services. Companies in this line of business require a continuous and uninterrupted connectivity to the internet and hence, their connectivity to multiple carriers guarantees performance and uptime to far higher levels than any individual carrier can promise.

Maria Scicluna is product development executive at BMIT, a local cloud services provider.