Prepare for Heavy Loads this Holiday Season - Minimizing the Damage
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Short of having a completely redundant system, there are a number of things you can do to minimize the impact of unplanned downtime. You can have some older machines set up to display friendly outage messages. There are a variety of ways you can alert your customers to let them know that you are working on the problem. At this point, it is important that they not be greeted by cryptic error messages or other things that would make them think you’re not on top of the situation.
The final step, of course, is to resolve the issue. Here, you will find that IT staff may take a wide range of attitudes as to the importance of taking care of an outage. Some won’t rush to deal with the problem regardless of how severe it is, while others will immediately start doing everything in their power. But in all cases, they must take their cues from those above them.
One chief technology officer, who works for a company that provides Internet email monitoring and website monitoring services for business, puts the issue in perspective. He conveys to his staff that the only thing that takes priority over a virus or system outage is loss of life. “Simply put, if you are giving mouth-to-mouth or pulling someone out of a burning building, you are excused. Otherwise, stop whatever you are doing and get the issue resolved.”
To sum up, then, monitored, redundant systems are the best way to avoid outages. But if you can’t afford to set that up, for whatever reason, you can still monitor your system, set and keep maintenance windows, greet users with friendly messages, keep the lines of communication open, and make sure your IT staff responds to all problems seriously and in a timely manner. In this way, you can lessen the impact of outages – and help everyone to have a better holiday season!
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