Downtime’s Going to Hurt: Prep Now to Mitigate Impact
Downtime. This simple word can easily cause dread and heart palpitations for your IT team. Any time lost from an unexpected outage – from severe weather, a cyber-strike or other network-wide outages – can be detrimental to an organization’s business processes and bottom line.
According to Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis Report, outage costs have increased 39% from 2019, with more than 60% of outages ending up topping more than $100,000. Outages costing $1 million plus in costs increased to 15% from 11% in 2019.
And these costs aren’t just found in dollar figures. An organization’s downtime can also impact customer and employee relations and put a substantial drain on your resources. Strategic disaster recovery plans that can include secondary locations and the utilization of software, such as managed file transfer (MFT), with high availability and clustering can go a long way in taming downtime costs -- both hard and soft.
Who Needs a Second Site for Disaster Recovery?
A secondary location, disaster recovery, or backup site is an important resource for any organization to consider when planning for business continuity after a security breach or natural disaster. With a second site available, your organization can temporarily relocate and restore operations should critical operations and infrastructure be impacted.
Any organization that conducts business by exchanging data – and it would be tough to think of one that does not – should consider a second site for effective disaster recovery. Technology that is mission-critical, such as your managed file transfer tool, can be set up both at the primary business location and at the backup site, as a mirrored, non-production instance.
“When you establish a second instance of your file transfer solution, you can take advantage of testing your recovery and failover processes from a data center or other location to ensure you’re able to meet your SLAs with customers and partners, and internal parties before the actual need to do so,” said Chris Bailey, Senior Product Manager for Fortra’s GoAnywhere. “Implementing a secure file transfer tool at two locations goes a long way in helping you safeguard your infrastructure and meet any established recovery time goals.”
On-Demand Webinar: Get the Most Out of GoAnywhere: High Availability and Clustering
Incorporate High Availability and Clustering Enterprise-Wide
To help mitigate an outage’s impact on your organization and bolster your disaster recovery plan, proactive steps should include implementing software solutions, like GoAnywhere MFT, that feature high availability and clustering along with a secondary location.
GoAnywhere offers true active-active deployments so you can be assured of high availability with dual instances of your secure file transfer tool. And the solution’s load-balancing feature, GoAnywhere Gateway, delivers non-stop network availability by distributing workloads across multiple installations within a cluster. With GoAnywhere Gateway, each inbound connection to the File Servers can be distributed to the available systems to service your employees and trading partners.
And for those file transfers that are performed in workflows, clustering allows the workload to be distributed across all systems to increase performance and throughput.
Businesses and enterprises that are growing can be confident that enterprise-level GoAnywhere MFT can grow alongside you as your file transfer requirements and business expands by adding additional systems to the cluster.
Related Reading: The Benefits of Clustering
