Its is the time of year when many of us take holidays.
Businesses and organisations may run on reduced staffing levels, but its not often that companies can completely shut down.
In today’s global fast-moving economy, while your staff may be on holiday relaxing with their families, your business is most likely still operating. To accomplish this, your customers may need access to online resources stored on servers hosted within your office data centre or server room.
Even if your business is not hosting databases or servers locally, when staff are out of the office for a prolonged period there’s no one onsite who can monitor potential issues, such as a water leakage, or the dangerously high temperature in the server room.
Why monitoring your environment is vital
Both commercial buildings and computer networks have safeguards in place to protect them, and the employees who work within them. Smoke detectors and fire alarms help alert the employees and fire brigade if a fire is detected, while firewalls help protect the virtual network and sensitive data from intrusion, manipulation and theft by hackers.
While the two factors mentioned above are crucial to maintaining your organisation’s uptime and revenue, there are numerous other issues that can bring business to a screeching halt, especially if they occur during a long weekend or in a period when your staff are away from the office for a long length of time.
Here are some important figures to consider over the holidays, especially if you don’t currently use any proactive environment monitoring tools:
- Businesses are 10 times more likely to be hit by flood damage than fire damage.
- 30% of all outages affecting businesses are caused by environmental factors.
- 40% of all small to medium businesses shut down within a year of suffering from a major outage.
Most organisations would never consider not having a firewall to protect their sensitive data, nor would they shut off building alarms and smoke detectors when they leave the office for a holiday break.
So the implication is clear – if you monitor your network for a security breach, and your facility for smoke/fire, why wouldn’t you check for temperature, humidity, flood, power, and more? After all, these factors can cause just as much of a problem to your organisation, yet they are largely preventable when you can see the warning signs.
