Why Business Continuity is the Biggest CIO Consideration

By

The first and last job for every CIO is to ensure a network infrastructure that is always available. As Internet assets increase in importance not only to the bottom line but to the very core of many large organizations, business continuity solutions have become mission-critical components of the enterprise toolkit. Outright outages can have huge negative impacts on a business - and its CIO - but slowdowns in performance and issues with availability can also have far-reaching impacts on a Web-centric business, turning potential customers to competitors.

Protect Revenue and Brand Reputation

A 2014 study by Avaya found that 80 percent of network outages result in lost revenue and that the average outage within the financial sector resulted in over $540,000 in lost revenue. For large Web properties and enterprises across sectors, ensuring business continuity means ensuring profits.

Network slowdowns and failures also hurt reputation. For savvy consumers with high expectations for website responsiveness, a delay of more than three seconds when accessing a website is a reflection on the quality of the company and can lead to a trip to a competitor’s site. For financial institutions banking on sleek mobile app experiences, site slowdowns and outages can erase all the goodwill that the company has engendered with customers in one bad experience. For retailers, one bad impression can be enough to lose a customer for life.

Monitoring and controlling Web assets with Internet Performance Management tools is the only way to fully understand performance, availability and reachability issues for end-users around the world, providing IT execs with the knowledge and control to avoid costly business continuity issues.

Improved Mean Time to Innocence

The increasing complexity of interconnected networks has made pinpointing root causes for errors more difficult than ever. In the event your assets are experiencing slowdowns or an outright outage, your cloud providers, CDNs, and acceleration services may claim to be "up" but that does not necessarily mean that they are reachable. In many cases they are experiencing a constant rate of low-level failure that is largely outside IT's control and is still affecting users.

Root cause analysis is the only sure-fire way to reduce “mean time to innocence”: you want to determine as quickly as possible where any problem lies so you can dispatch resources in the appropriate direction.  Successful troubleshooting requires proper insight into your internal and external infrastructure, from data centers to ISP performance to cloud and CDN routing and configuration. The most effective way to understand performance in the network is by constantly monitoring the most important third parties that your systems depend on and implementing tools that alert you when they have performance issues that could affect you.

Quickening the mean time to innocence can have impacts on more than the IT space. Knowing where performance issues start can help your company provide better client support, improving communication and providing a service feature that can set your company apart from the competition.

Failure is not an Option

There are few events more damaging to a company (and its executives) than an outright failure - especially if that failure could be foreseen and prevented with the help of Internet Performance Management and monitoring and traffic management tools. In March of last year, one of the largest online retailers experienced an outage that caused one of their premier storefronts to be unavailable for 11 hours from what would later be described as an “internal DNS error” costing the company millions. And while your business might not be one of the most-trafficked Web properties in the world, a half-day outage is a hit any business would prefer to avoid, especially with cost-effective secondary DNS and Internet monitoring services available to help avoid disaster. Understanding the routing, performance and security characteristics of just your internal network is not enough in today’s cloud and CDN dependent ecosystem: you need a view of the entire Internet.

Conclusion


Internet Performance Management tools help to identify and mitigate risks that can lead to business continuity issues, providing the always-available reliability that CIOs need in a dynamic online environment. Tools to monitor Internet performance and take action if problems occur are the answer to most high-level business continuity issues, helping enable better security, provide mission-critical insights into the global Internet and ensuring that a disruptive event doesn’t cost the company time and money.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Related Articles

Can Science Outsmart Deepfake Deceivers? Klick Labs Proposes an Emerging Solution

By: Alex Passett    3/25/2024

Researchers at Klick Labs were able to identify audio deepfakes from authentic audio recordings via new vocal biomarker technology (alongside AI model…

Read More

Top 5 Best Ways to Integrate Technology for Successful Project-Based Learning

By: Contributing Writer    3/19/2024

Project-based learning, also popularly known as the PBL curriculum, emphasizes using and integrating technology with classroom teaching. This approach…

Read More

How to Protect Your Website From LDAP Injection Attacks

By: Contributing Writer    3/12/2024

Prevent LDAP injection attacks with regular testing, limiting access privileges, sanitizing user input, and applying the proper encoding functions.

Read More

Azure Cost Optimization: 5 Things You Can Do to Save on Azure

By: Contributing Writer    3/7/2024

Azure cost optimization is the process of managing and reducing the overall cost of using Azure. It involves understanding the resources you're using,…

Read More

Massive Meta Apps and Services Outage Impacts Users Worldwide

By: Alex Passett    3/5/2024

Meta's suite of apps and services are experiencing major global outages on Super Tuesday 2024.

Read More