4 Essential Measures After Suffering Business Downtime

Business downtime can come for any enterprise. It can be easy to forecast and occur entirely due to negligence, or it can be completely out of the blue and catch even industry titans by surprise. We saw that with the Covid-19 pandemic, and unfortunately, we’re currently seeing it in the United States as many companies deal with the consequences of hurricanes and other natural disasters.

However, no matter how downtime is experienced, be that a less obvious cause or even blindingly obvious, it’s always important for a business to review its actions and experiences and seek ways to improve for next time. While no business was responsible for the pandemic, you can bet many have put in place plans to help them weather such a difficulty if it were to occur again.

Business downtime is perhaps one of the gravest difficulties a business can experience because no matter the success they’ve enjoyed nor the potential for development they have, a paused operation is a paused operation. Putting safeguards in place from then on is essential. Let’s consider how:

A Complete Failure Audit

Experiencing downtime can be a harsh wake-up call to put it mildly, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow. Implementing a thorough failure audit allows a business to get into the root causes of the interruption and apply fair accountability where it’s needed 

This isn’t about pointing fingers of course; but for understanding what went wrong so it can be fixed moving forward. We’d recommend using a team from different departments can shed light on issues that might have been ignored leading up to the issue. Open and honest communication during this process can bring your team together and help you better understand the risks for next time.

Identifying Weakest Operational Spots

This previous audit should hopefully help identify where and when the weakest failures were and occurred. Perhaps there’s outdated technology that can’t keep up during peak times, maybe you realize you were actually just understaffed, or it could be that certain policies aren’t as robust as they should be, and now you have reduced goodwill on your hands due to inconveniencing your customers. Perhaps despite your downtime, your policy didn’t allow for refunds, and now customers are complaining en masse. That’s a good sign to make some kind of exception.

It can be somewhat humbling to see where these weak spots are but at least you’ve found them and can course correct. Just make sure not to use this as a vengeful means of dismissing staff or a department if negligence hasn’t be an issue – they likely want to be as robust as possible too.

Reviewing B2B Errors & Partner Failing

It’s not all in-house. Sometimes a supplier, B2B partner or provider let you down, and you may have some options available if that’s the case. 

A good way to start is to have open communication with said partners about your performance expectations and reliability, helping you renegotiating terms or seek alternatives if it’s truly necessary. It might be time to assess whether current partnerships are really reliable with the company’s standards and goals, especially during a crunch time like this. If you can’t give a resounding yes to that question, it may be worth paying more for a service that can. For instance, perhaps you found a cheap deal with a web host, but they’re fairly lax with applying security patches and this stung you. This can be part of your audit, but of course, not solely internally focused.

Reviewing Insurance & Loss Contracts

Ensuring that the business is properly protected financially or operationally can make a big difference in your recovery speed after suffering that downtime. For instance, using this DLP buyers guide to properly assess if your data loss prevention processes are up to standard can help you avoid losing valuable information and documentation from then on, even if you’ve experienced a difficult breach or mismanagement of your current systems.

In some cases, you may even learn the hard way that your insurance didn’t quite cover as much as you had liked it to. Or, now that you’ve put a large claim in, your insurance provider may have raised the cost of a new yearly plan, and this may prompt you to seek another provider. Downtime can be difficult, but having more safeguards in place can be much better than expected.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily renew your business planning after suffering downtime.