National Server Downtime Day

Have you heard about the new public holiday being enjoyed by office workers all around the UK?

It’s called National Server Downtime Day. At least that’s what we’ve christened it here at OCD after our most recent research showed that – on average – 7.5 hours of work each year per employee are lost to every server outage.

That’s one full day of productivity per server per annum, presumably adding up to billions of pounds in lost revenue, and that’s just the average. The figures vary widely. We drew on a range of statistics, from the UK government and industry surveys to anecdotes from new customers coming to OCD dissatisfied with the service they’d received elsewhere.

We discovered one instance where 87 hours of work a year was lost to each server. On the flip side, that dropped to just over two hours for Windows 2008 servers in a large data centre. Recent independent research by operations management firm Avocent found that a third of companies had lost mission-critical data due to unplanned downtime and 43% reported, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events each month.

OCD customers face no such frustrating and unnecessary disruptions to their time and profitability. We are very proud to say that our clients experience unplanned outages of less than three hours per year – two hours and 42 minutes to be precise. That’s a performance rate of 99.99%, a phenomenal achievement given that most of the companies don’t have an IT specialist onsite.

OCD customers know that the service we provide will ultimately save or even make them money. As one put it recently, “We might as well have given the staff an extra holiday for the time we used to lose until OCD took over our support.” That customer now gets an extra day and a half’s productivity per server per year.

So how do we do it? Put simply, by learning about how your business works, by providing a bespoke IT system to meet those requirements and by adopting a proactive approach.

Our support and maintenance schedules always include:

• Scheduled and planned visits by our Microsoft server experts who carry out a series of checks and maintenance routines to ensure that the server is working to specified tolerances.

 

• Constant monitoring of servers using a wide variety of tolerances and thresholds so that if one of those is breached, a loud alarm sounds in our technical offices and we react instantly to bring server performance back to normal, which in most cases can be carried out remotely.

 

• Keeping servers updated with relevant software patches. OCD tests them beforehand to avoid risk to server performance. This is something that very few other IT support companies do and it is often untested patches and updates that play havoc with server reliability.

 

OCD has been looking after the IT systems of legal practice David Devine & Company based in Glasgow since 2007. As David points out in this newsletter’s case study: “I’m pretty cynical about the promises made by technology companies, but OCD has delivered everything the way it said it would. In three years we haven’t had any unscheduled outages: I think that says everything anyone needs to know about OCD”.

And we agree. So let’s hear it for National Server Downtime Day – one public holiday that OCD customers won’t be taking.

Until next time,

 Kevin

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