What’s the true cost of downtime for your organization? You may think of it in terms of lost revenue—according to studies released in the last couple years, the average cost of system-wide downtime is $100,000 an hour, and that’s on the low end (it can get up to $300,000 or more). But there are other factors involved in the price of downtime that can hurt a company’s productivity and resources.
Take your file transfers, for example. When a system goes down, an organization doesn’t just lose money. Important files exchanged with trading partners are delayed or unsuccessful, which can cause critical deliveries to bottleneck on both sides.
The chain of problems this creates can be endless. A vendor doesn’t get their payment, customers don’t receive their order, a payment isn’t sent to accounting, an MRI fails to get added to a patient’s health record… and so on. As the fallout stacks up, employees may need to be pulled from important projects or tasks to deal with the growing list of unsuccessful file transfers. This can take hours to resolve and cause other areas of the business to back up, depending on what else you’re now behind on from having to reshuffle your workforce.
The truth is, downtime doesn’t only cause interrupted sales, web traffic, and phone calls. It can touch every area of your organization and leave you with a trail of knots to untangle across several departments and vendors.
How to Avoid the Pain of Downtime
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that downtime can’t always be avoided, especially when it’s caused by natural occurrences (power outages, storms, etc.). In these cases, it’s good to have a disaster recovery plan in place to get you up and running again as soon as possible while minimizing overall losses.
The good news? In other situations, like a faulty server that suddenly goes offline, there are ways to ensure your file transfers stay running while you troubleshoot the problem areas. The best way to prepare for file transfer downtime is by enabling clustering, a high availability strategy, across all critical systems in your environment.
Why Should You Use Clustering?
Clustering distributes file transfers across servers for maximum high availability. By routing data to available systems, clustering can help ensure that workloads are kept active and distributed evenly across your environment, even during periods of downtime. In the event a system fails, the remaining systems in the cluster you’ve set up will take over your file transfer processes and workflows.
Why should you use clustering? Simply put, clustering (when used properly) can give you peace of mind that your file transfers are protected during unavoidable disasters. That way, when downtime strikes, you can spend your resources dealing with the other issues on your plate—rather than spending them dealing with unhappy customers and trading partners.
Achieving a Reliable, Active-Active Environment
You can implement clustering for your file transfers with a managed file transfer (MFT) solution. Not only useful for keeping your business initiatives running smoothly, achieving a clustered environment via managed file transfer can also help you stay compliant with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that require your servers to be part of a high availability solution.
Once your file transfer systems are clustered, you can enjoy these benefits (and more) in your organization:
- Clustered systems can connect to the same database and share security settings, project definitions, job schedules, trading partner user accounts, and other details.
- Folder monitors (if applicable) and workloads will be evenly distributed across the cluster, allowing for faster processing of file transfers.
- Details for brute-force and DoS attack prevention are shared with all clustered systems, so your settings are consistent no matter which system transmits files to and from your users.
Discover File Transfer Clustering and High Availability
GoAnywhere MFT is an all-in-one file transfer solution that makes it easy to set up a clustered environment for file transfers. Implementation and configuration are simplified so you can get up and running quickly. Plus, GoAnywhere doesn’t require write scripts, have a background in programming, or use third-party tools to run. Everything you need to achieve maximum file transfer high availability is included in one powerful, secure package.
Learn how GoAnywhere can help you streamline your file transfers and cluster your systems. Watch Get the Most Out of GoAnywhere: High Availability and Clustering on demand to see MFT, and its many features, in action.
