Certainly, enterprises always expect high availability for their system. Poor services resulted from downtime such as losing data, website inaccessibility, etc can make your customer feel insecure. They may complain or potential ones just leave and never return. Their money will never come to you.
Regarding some online services like online banking or stock trading, time is so important that downtime, even just in some minute, can lead to significant revenue loss and other unhappy consequences.
In another case, drops in availability for internal service can result in ineffective productivity, which causes losing your money for nothing.
Therefore, companies takes high availability into consideration. Their systems should be at least 99.999% uptime to ensure continuous operation.
So how it can be?
- Good server infrastructure
Server’s upgrade also means that your system would stop working for a period of time. So, you need to make sure that you have a good choice to a server. It should be high-quality service and not soon to need upgrading.
- Network clustering
This strategy allows two or more servers working together. Incoming requests for services can be distributed across multiple computers (servers).
If server A has been taken down for some reasons (eg: maintenance), its resources and all operations from server A can be switch to server B in the same cluster, without causing disruption to the system as a whole.
- Load Balancing
Load balancing will distribute workload evenly across two or more computers, networking, CPU, hard drives, or other computing resources. This technique aims to avoid overload and network congestion as well as keep your system high availability
- Scale out your infrastructure
‘Put all your eggs in one basket’ is quite risky. So large firm not only focus on upgrading capacity for their current servers but also add new ones to network. This will minimize downtime and traffic overload risk by dividing the load on your infrastructure.
- Learn about the RTO / RPO and test your recovery plan
These RTO/RPO will help you with unplanned downtime (disaster, power outage, etc), especially if your business relates to financial, banks and online trading with many transaction.
RTO – Recovery Time Objective is the time you need to restore all applications and enterprise’s system. RPO – Recovery Point Objective indicate the amount of time you need to know to back up data.
Eg: RPO = 1 hour, so you can only accept 1 hour data loss, which means you should back-up data every hour.
Even if you have good products with reasonable price or good website, your online business still may not be successful because lacking of high availability. Maintaining availability will help you avoid revenue loss and increase your reputation.
