Network outages are bad news for businesses. They can result in loss of data, productivity, business opportunities, revenue and reputation, and create headaches for IT departments.
While network outages cannot be completely prevented, you can take certain measures to reduce their occurrences. In order to minimize network outages, you need to know why they occur and how you can prevent them.
Common Causes of Network Outages
- Congestion
Congestion is the main cause of short network outages.
Generally, outages that result from congestion are characterized by an uptime of 10 seconds followed by chaos that last for about 30 seconds, during which the circuit is gridlocked to the extent that you cannot load a webpage.
The problem will go away for a while and then come back again. Retrying on failed connections is the main reason behind the cyclical nature of congestion outages. It is relatively common for congestion outages to occur on wireless networks.
The best way to prevent congestion outages is to use bandwidth control. Alternatively, you can increase your bandwidth. However, if you do not have bandwidth control, congestion will return after the added bandwidth is absorbed.
- Errors
According to an article entitled “The Main Cause of Network Outages and How to Prevent It“, human error is responsible for about 49 percent of all network outages. Network outages can result from many different types of errors, ranging from coding errors to communication errors.
In order to reduce the risk of network outages, you need to implement best practice guidelines for IT management. You can reduce coding errors significantly by conducting code reviews in software development processes to improve code quality.
Before you make changes to your systems, you have to monitor them properly and configure alerts to enable your IT team to respond promptly if a particular system is negatively affected by a change.
When you are making massive changes to your systems that can have an impact on multiple parts of your infrastructure, break them down into smaller and more manageable tasks, so that errors can be isolated and fixed more easily.
Also, it is important that you create an action plan for addressing errors when they occur.
- Hack Attacks
Hack attacks can happen to businesses of all sizes, and they can have drastic consequences. Other than network outages, they can also cause you to lose important data and customer trust, and make you susceptible to lawsuits.
Cyber criminals have become highly skilled these days, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stop them. However, there are many things that you can do to reduce the risk of hack attacks, such as using stronger passwords, implementing two-step verification, installing firewalls and antimalware tools, scanning untrustworthy hard drives and thumb drives for malware, keeping an eye out for phishing scams and others.
Other than taking measures to prevent network outages, you should also develop and implement a comprehensive network recovery plan.
This can help you reduce losses significantly.
About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from social media marketing to Cloud computing.
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