How to Minimize Production Downtime in Office 365
Downtime costs can suffocate businesses and disrupt business operations. In 2021, unplanned downtime costs require a multi-prone strategy that considers all the factors that cause them. Therefore, to understand how to minimize production downtime, businesses must examine all the factors that cause unplanned downtime in Office 365.
For all the benefits of Microsoft Office 365, including collaboration and productivity, it’s up to the user to combat each factor that causes downtime. While Microsoft provides several features to do that, users must learn how to use these features themselves. Moreover, businesses can minimize downtime using third-party backup tools specifically designed for Office 365 environments.
This guide will explain the nature of downtime and the strategies to combat it. Let’s begin.
How Is Downtime Hurting Your Business?
First and foremost, what is downtime, and how is it harming business continuity? In a professional sense, downtime is the process where workstations are not producing, operating, or working. Downtime essentially results in business delays, which ultimately harm business continuity.
Examples of downtime for businesses using Office 365 are disaster strikes, equipment failure, natural disasters, ransomware attacks, and similar causes. As one can imagine, the loss of business continuity results in lost revenue for your company. Considering that more businesses rely on cloud-based services for day-to-day operations, businesses must reduce downtime and ensure operating systems are fully operational.
As luck would have it, businesses can minimize downtime in a few ways, including obtaining third-party solutions and developing preventive maintenance strategies. To better explain your options, let’s go into each one separately.
4 Ways to Minimize Office 365 Downtime
Keep A Backup of Your Data
Data protection is a core component of modern business operations. For businesses that use and rely on Office 365, ensuring the total protection of customer and business data will ensure business continuity. The suite provides multiple ways to protect your data, and one of these includes keeping backups.
In Office 365, several features and apps will allow you to develop a backup strategy. However, it’s up to the user to use these features and apps properly. Therefore, a much more reliable solution to mitigate data loss from human error, outdated hardware, and natural disasters is to go with third-party backup and recovery tools.
These tools are specially designed to mitigate the risks associated with data loss and stolen data. They might cost more, but they provide businesses with the piece of mind of knowing their data is protected at all times.
Educate Your Workforce
Cyber education is becoming a top priority for many businesses using cloud-based services for day-to-day business operations. Cyberattacks are a common downtime causation, and businesses using Office 365 are no exception. Cyberattacks, such as ransomware, are devastating attacks that not only reduce employee productivity but can put you out of business.
The reputational damages from potential data breaches are the reason why you must educate your workforce on the dangers of the cyber world and ways to detect and deal with cyber threats. Proper communication and security awareness training programs are the best way to educate your workforce.
Have A Disaster Recovery Strategy In Place
DR (disaster recovery) planning is crucial to mitigate any downtime, such as a potential natural disaster striking your offices. DR planning takes into account RTO (recovery time objective) and other factors crucial for making sure IT professionals have a fast recovery in place. With a disaster recovery strategy, businesses essentially ensure business continuity by having multiple ways to recover potentially lost data.
Moreover, a disaster recovery plan will tell you how much time you have to live without access to data and the amount of data you can afford to lose while facing potential threats. As a result, businesses know how much time they have to maintain peak performance across the Office 365 suite.
Keep Your Office 365 Up To Date
Regular maintenance of Office 365 apps is yet another effective way to minimize downtime. Microsoft regularly dishes out updates and patches for its cloud suite to combat the ongoing rate of cyberattacks. While not every patch will contain security updates for phishing attacks or ransomware, it’s important to keep the suite up to date whenever a new patch is available.
While on the subject of updating Office 365, users must also regularly update any additional software they might be using for day-to-day operations. You can instruct the IT team to implement the necessary steps to automatically update these systems to resolve issues.
Consider Downtime Preventing as a Service
Nowadays, the market is saturated with numerous solutions to aid day-to-day business operations. Office 365 is one such solution. But, as mentioned previously, we can also use third-party backup and DR services to put our foot off the gas and focus on what’s important. That’s not to say that preventing downtime isn’t important, but few employees are knowledgeable about these things.
Therefore, you can enlist the services of professionals who develop tools and software to help you minimize downtime and ensure business continuity across the board. This also applies to businesses that rely on cloud-based services like Office 365.
