Business continuity is defined as “the capability of an organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable pre-defined levels following a disruptive incident” (source: ISO 22301:2012, Business Continuity Institute).
This requires IT leaders to make the connection between business and technology performance. The most basic of this connection is to know how IT systems and networks are functioning for business continuity.
In an SMB survey conducted by IDC (2014), network downtime was reported to have costed $20,000 per hour for at least 80 percent of the respondents. The remaining 20 percent estimated losses of at least $100,000 an hour.
Infrastructure and network performance monitoring systems can go a long way to saving and making money for SMBs. The monitored data, if handled well, can help inform operational decisions on many aspects, from pre-empting service degradation and staffing helpdesk to trouble-shooting performance failures or managing outage and date recovery. When required, business-IT stakeholders can further draw insights for capacity planning, resource allocation, architecture design, usage evolution, etc.
Large enterprise ITOM teams are well aware of the power of knowing through good IT infrastructure monitoring. So why not SMBs?
SMBs are consuming more computing power, storage and mobile solutions as well as adopting diverse cloud services. Thanks to these technologies, they can now do more with less to reach global markets, customers and business stakeholders without much of a second thought. Less of the good news is that this trend is not likely to make life easier for their IT managers. Relying increasingly on web services, virtual machines and cloud applications heaps on higher security, compliance and service expectations for business operations, whether they are a large enterprise or an SMB.
A good monitoring system enables the SMB IT managers to easily do the following with instant and parallel visibility:
- Check and track the health and capacity of IT assets, resources and networks 24/7
- Respond timely to unexpected incidents
- Identify system failures or malfunctions
- Pinpoint anomalies that threaten operational efficiency or security
- Ensure and maintain service availability
- Optimize and improve network performance and reliability
- Create a database of valuable time series metrics for analysis
- Lighten administrative and help desk loads to re-direct scarce resources
Go further with Centreon IMP, a packaged and turnkey IT monitoring solution with online subscription.
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