Just a few decades ago, no company had servers. They did not even use those of third parties. In fact, in the business world, the functions of servers were hardly known, nor was it conceived what they could bring to a business. So no one was worried about the down servers system administrator requirements.
However, with the popularization of networks and the Internet, things have changed. Servers are now a part of the life of many businesses, taking over some key tasks in order to be able to function on a daily basis.
Now, as you can imagine, in this world we live in, we are always exposed to the unexpected. Nothing is immune from potential failure or loss of performance, and that includes servers as well. For some businesses, a down server can be a minor or even major disaster.
But what can be the reasons why this happens? What can affect a company's servers in this way? And once that happens, what can be the consequences? Let's try to answer these questions.
Server down: some causes may arise
The reasons why a server can see its performance affected or stop functioning are so varied that it would be almost impossible to put them together in a single article, so we will refer to some of the more common ones.
-Physical causes: Accidents such as falling from a rack or accidents such as fire or flooding can cause serious problems for servers.
-Power outages: Of course, servers need power to keep running, so its lack will cause them to shut down.
-Hardware issues: Failures caused by various factors, such as overheating, can cause a server to crash.
-Software problems: They can also be of different kinds. For example, they can be due to database issues.
-External actions: The presence of malware or external attacks can also cause a server failure.
How can a server failure hurt a business?
When we talk about problems in the business world, the first thing we usually ask ourselves is what the economic impact of an event will be. Although it is difficult to establish concrete figures - since the calculations depend on multiple factors, such as the activity of the company or the number of departments that are affected by the decline - one can see, as a example, some of the aspects where a down server can harm your business.
Lost sales
Imagine that the server that supports the web page through which your business makes a good portion of its sales (maybe all!) Goes down.
Loss of service, even for a few hours, can do a lot of financial damage. Anyone who tries to make a purchase during this time and cannot do so will likely choose to use (the competition's) pages that work. And not only that. Some of these people, disappointed that they can't use your page, may not do it again in the future.
Loss of productivity
Now imagine that the downed server took over some important services in your business, such as some programs that your staff are working with. A down server will prevent your employees from using them for a period of time, possibly hampering their work, affecting their productivity.
Additionally, these types of issues, returning to the previous point, can also affect your customers. Suppose the downed server takes care of the software that supports billing. It stops working, and as a result, for a long time your customers are also affected while shopping. It hurts.
Image issues
The above is an example which, in turn, also helps us to introduce other types of problems, such as those derived from the bad image that can be conveyed to customers. In fact, a webpage or billing system that goes down will not only affect the exact moment they occur, but will also convey a negative image of the business, with all the negative consequences that can bring.
Server monitoring
As we have seen, the causes for which one can find a down server are varied and the problems that failures can cause to a business are not negligible. And now you are wondering, what can I do to avoid them?
Well, the answer to this question would be enough to write another article (or several books!), But one of the things that can help is to have good monitoring software And, since you are on the Pandora blog FMS, it's normal that we give a reference to our beloved software, don't you think?
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