Risking Your Brand with the Availability Gap

In the event that your application’s offline, end users will need to wait to access it until the problem is resolved. If this is a once-off situation, then this isn’t a big deal. If this scenario plays out two, three, or more times a month, then a much bigger problem is developing.

Known as the availability gap, or the lack of having your platform available to your users 24x7x365, is an evergreen challenge facing IT departments. As our desire for connectivity continues to expand, demand for availability at every hour of the day is quickly becoming an important part of the IT scorecard.

In a recent study by Veeam®  (1,140 respondents), 68 percent believed that their downtime resulted in a loss of customer confidence; 62 percent believed it damaged brand integrity; 51 percent believed it leads to a loss of employee confidence; and 26 percent believed it would result in legal action.

While the short-term cash implications can be serious, the long-term threat of lost confidence is a significant road bump against gaining traction with your service. If internal employees cannot trust that the mission-critical platforms will be available when required, then they are less likely to develop new tools and services around these platforms, which means your capital investments are underutilized.

Worse, if a customer can no longer depend on your platform being available, then it’s not only a loss of confidence from a paying user, but it also impacts their operations and will likely result in a decline of revenue if your company is unable to sustain availability.

For nearly every company, your brand is the most important asset to the success of your operation. If your name becomes associated with frequent outages, trying to repair the damage done will result in significantly increased marketing costs and lost potential revenue. If you are not investing in shoring up how to avoid and recover from an outage, you are overlooking a material weakness to your brand and identity.