How To Improve Application Uptime

Maintaining application availability is key to the success of any digital business. Enterprises that build highly scalable applications need to ensure they provide a reliable and secure service. An outage or downtime can occur in numerous ways, causing you to lose potential revenue, harm your reputation, and even result in data loss and legal consequences.

For this reason, it’s vital to always be on the lookout for ways to improve your application uptime.

The True Cost of Downtime

Facebook — now Meta — lost an estimated $100 million in revenue during a six-hour outage in 2021, according to Fortune. Delays of that length can feel like an eternity to visitors in today’s instant gratification online world and have devastating effects on an enterprise.

For data center-reliant or data-driven enterprises, downtime costs are on the rise. This is especially true for enterprises that offer financial services, healthcare, communications, and industrial IoT. According to the 2021 IBM Cost of Data Breach Report, the average data breach cost increased to $4.24 million in 2021, up from $3.86 million in 2019. The 2021 figure is the highest in the report’s 17-year history.

In a Global Data Center Survey by Uptime Institute, 60% of respondents reported a loss of more than $100,000 due to downtime; 15% of those respondents lost more than $1 million.The increasing dependence on remote work and learning has put a strain on IT departments and cyber security teams, resulting in higher downtime costs.

Read more: The Hidden Cost of Downtime

The Basic Elements of High Application Uptime

There are three crucial elements to enabling high application uptime. They include:

• Redundancy: No component should cause downtime to your entire operation. You should ensure that all components critical to the application’s operations have redundant alternatives that will take over in the event of a failure.
• Monitoring:You need to monitor and collect data from the production system to spot issues and identify when a component is not working. Ideally, you should automate processes to avoid common causes of failure or downtime.
• Testing: Any changes made to your system must be tested thoroughly. And because changes can happen that you may not be aware of (e.g. network or infrastructure managed by another department), testing should be done continuously — and automatically.

Technical Components That Drive High Application Uptime

To implement the crucial elements of high application uptime, you need the following:

• Automated data backup and recovery: Every enterprise is concerned about the security of its data and components, and for good reason. You need a system that automatically backs up data to secondary storage and then restores it to its original location.
• Load balancing: A critical part of ensuring high application uptime is to ensure that any server failures are dealt with in real-time. A load balancer routes traffic among multiple systems detects system failures and diverts traffic to another.
• Continuous testing: Enterprises should ensure the utmost security by continuously running automated tests for vulnerabilities. This should occur through the development cycle. Ensure to run automated regression testing, penetration testing, and ethical hacking to discover issues before they become severe.

Best Practices for Improving Application Uptime

Test Often and Deploy Consistently

One sure way to be a step ahead in maintaining application uptime is to test for failures regularly. Enterprises need to consistently put their applications through rigorous tests to ensure they are resilient to problems. Of course, no software is immune to failure, but you can ensure they don’t occur during business-critical hours by detecting and fixing them early.

You should attempt to break your application as often as possible and deploy rapid changes to fix any issues detected. That way, you won’t expose yourself to long-lasting reputational damage or financial loss.

Monitor Application Health

Understanding how your infrastructure and software perform in real-time is critical to ensuring high availability. If you use effective analytics or uptime monitoring applications, you can identify pending issues early, allowing you to resolve them before they become a problem.

Uptime monitoring functionalities available in solutions such as Uptime by Oshyn can provide insight into the performance of your application, helping you optimize your infrastructure operations and workflow, identify and resolve problems as they emerge, and gain insight into how the application is being used.

Eliminate Single Points of Failure

A single point of failure refers to one design or implementation flaw or malfunction that causes an entire enterprise infrastructure to fail.For systems that demand high availability and reliability, single points of failure are unacceptable.

By thoroughly reviewing your architecture, you should identify single points of failure that can be resolved with clustering, redundancy, virtualization, and load balancing.

Automate as Much as Possible

How quickly you recover can have a major impact on the availability of your application. It’s crucial to recover promptly by correctly diagnosing the issue and ensuring it doesn’t recur. For humans to diagnose and resolve these issues, the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) will take longer, often affecting customer experience.

In light of these, you should enable automation as much as possible. That way, you can rapidly identify and resolve issues as they occur. Plus, you can set up automated actions that provide you with real-time notifications on the status of your application.

Plan and Test for Data Recovery

Having a disaster recovery plan is vital to ensuring continued data availability during a data center failure. You can leverage cloud-based data recovery solutions that act as an extension of your infrastructure, helping you recover from any outage or downtime. However, don’t just assume that you can recover your data, ensure to run data recovery tests for proper validation.

Leverage an Application Uptime Solution

It can be very daunting and time-consuming to monitor every component or process in your infrastructure. That’s why you need uptime monitoring and management software. These solutions offer a centralized application management system with efficient processes and features that ensure your applications remain operational.

Measure and Track Availability Metrics

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Enterprises should ensure to identify and track KPIs for availability. You want to select clear and achievable KPIs and set benchmarks for success. Some of the KPIs to track include mean-time-to-response, average monthly downtime, and downtime costs.

Tired of Application Downtime? Ensure High Availability With Uptime by Oshyn

Taking the time to put a plan in place for tackling application downtime can help save your business from data and financial loss, reputational damage, and even legal trouble. The best ways to ensure high uptime is to minimize potential risks, ensure continuous application monitoring, reduce technical debt, and automate as many processes as possible.

Uptime by Oshyn is an application uptime solution that helps to provide rapid issue resolution, which enhances the customer experience and application performance over time. The features that make it stand out as the best choice for boosting your application uptime include automated testing, patch management, performance scanning, continuous improvements, and 24/7 real-time monitoring, reports, and alerts.

Want to know about how Uptime by Oshyn improves application availability? Contact us or schedule a consultation today.