In this day and age, businesses need to have a strong web presence to succeed and grow in the market or industry they are in.
A wise man once said, ‘with a strong web presence, comes great responsibility’. This responsibility comes in the form of a talented and hard-working IT staff, normally costing an arm and a leg to hire this in-house talent to keep up with your IT demands. Partnering with Afonza helps you relieve these costs and reduce downtime using the power of AWS and Afonza consulting knowledge.
Most businesses tend to overlook the importance of availability for their websites and applications, but once you look at the numbers, it becomes hard to ignore the losses that come with downtime in an IT infrastructure.
According to a presentation involving AWS services at the 2018 AWS Summit in Atlanta, the average cost of downtime for a commercial application is per hour is about $474,000, equivalent to $141 per second. A critical application may lose anything between $500,000 to $1,000,000, while an annual fortune 1000 application will use about $1.25 to $2.5 billion per hour. Not only can these numbers be daunting, but on average, a data breach may cost a company about $3.6 million (Ponemon Institute). Security and availability are crucial for any commercial application, and sometimes it can be extremely inefficient to compete with traditional on-premises hardware.
There are also inherent costs involved with downtime, not always calculated or given a second thought, including recovery costs, such as the cost of employees working overtime, the cost of repairing devices or systems, and data recovery costs. For some businesses, downtime may negatively affect their supply chain, causing delays and fees (datafoundry.com). Not only are you losing opportunities in the form of advertising and sales, you can be losing money from customers in terms of the opportunity cost of people not being able to reach your site. These technical issues can lead to customer dissatisfaction along with a negative brand image if you are consistently dealing with server downtime.
With AWS and Afonza, there are no physical servers to manage, patch, or debug, no overtime employees to pay in the IT Department, or the upfront costs of repairing any hardware. Afonza finds ways to keep you from losing from the effects of server downtime. All of us at Afonza follow AWS’s best practice guidelines, ensuring redundancy and high availability for your website or application.
On average, only 2% of organizations recover from server downtime in under an hour (liquidweb.com). That being said, how can you reduce downtime? The short answer would be to follow AWS’s best practices. These optimization and security tips are followed by Afonza and are always a top priority. Only the best practices for each solution are carried out ensuring minimal downtime and high availability. These practices may include, but are not limited to these properly configured services and options: security groups, IAM roles, data life cycle management, fail-over instances, load balancers, and so much more.
Another way to avoid server downtime is by going serverless. With a serverless IT architecture, there are no traditional servers to manage, significantly reducing the risk of any downtime due to crashes. Afonza can guide you into your new serverless world, providing knowledge on existing infrastructure while also developing custom serverless solutions using AWS services like Lambda, S3, and many more!