Summer is here and many people are already turning their thoughts to their impending December break and some well-deserved rest and relaxation. But this does not mean expectations of continuous access to applications, services, and data should be lowered.

A modern business relies on delivering 24x7 availability, regardless of employee holidays. But what happens if the system breaks down during the week that a corporate IT manager has gone away? It will take longer than usual to get systems running again, and that in turn will impact corporate revenue and reputation.

Taking three basic precautions during the holidays would go great lengths to ensure that corporate applications, services, and data remain continuously available.

Avoid downtime

It is no longer the case that planned or unplanned downtime will not have a direct impact on vital services, whether it is revenue or reputation. According to the 2016 Veeam Availability Report, the average cost of downtime for mission-critical applications is just under $90,000 per hour in South Africa specifically. In addition, loss of customer confidence, damage to the brand, and loss of employee confidence were the top three non-financial results of poor availability.

Although employees are made aware that the system will be down for a period of time, this may still have a negative impact on productivity, profitability and workflow. A modern business requires constant and reliable data availability - especially during the holiday period when staff levels are lower.

Delete unnecessary data

Garbage data is a recognised problem, and one that can have the biggest impact on a firm's availability. Data like this eats up resources in the data centre, and can cause poor performance and system errors. To maintain high availability, it is essential to keep garbage data under control. Common culprits are installation files duplicated at several locations, as well as virtual machines that are invisible because they have been removed from the warehouse, but not permanently deleted.

When it comes to garbage data, users are often in a Catch-22 position. They are aware of unnecessary files but do not want to delete anything in case it is important. This method of keeping useless data is a legacy from the days when data protection and availability solutions were much less sophisticated, and restoring lost data was a cumbersome and difficult process.

Today, data recovery is much quicker, allowing you to recover what you want, when you want. Whether you have lost a backup copy of an important piece of data or unintentionally deleted some garbage data, it is much easier to restore, usually within seconds.

Have procedures in place before the holiday season

Another equally important issue is that data recovery for any application requires spending one of the most valuable resources – time.

The average downtime of critical applications in the IT systems of South African companies is almost six hours, an extended time for an organisation to be offline, when it could be as low as fifteen minutes. To ensure that services, applications and data are available throughout the holiday season, it is not only IT solutions that must be put in place, but also routine. Planning for restoring data in the fastest and easiest way when a problem has arisen is essential if we are to avoid unnecessary downtime and loss of corporate revenue.

Availability is as important during the holiday season as any other time, and downtime remains costly no matter what time of year it occurs. In today's connected world, end-users are expecting organisations to be Always-On and available. Unfortunately, the average number of failures in modern enterprises is still high.

According to the 2016 Veeam Availability Report, 84% of senior IT decision makers across the globe admit to suffering an 'Availability Gap' between what IT can deliver, and what users demand. This gap costs US$16 million a year in lost revenue and productivity, in addition to the negative impact on customer confidence and brand integrity (according to 68% and 62% of respondents, respectively).

This cost only increases as more time passes, and unless procedures are put in place before the holiday season, there is a high risk of unnecessarily long downtime and high revenue loss.

Despite it being a challenging year for many, decision-makers cannot afford to risk compromising their data during the traditionally quiet period of December and early January.

So even though the focus might be far from the data centre, safeguards need to be put in place to ensure that when employees return from their break, there is still a company to return to.