Despite being one of the most important factors that affect online businesses today, downtime is also often one of the most overlooked. Many organizations realize that downtime results in immediate money loss, customer satisfaction and employee productivity, yet fail to employ measures that will efficiently prevent it and reduce it. The bottom line is that downtime costs organizations tens of thousands of dollars per hour (approximately $5,600 per minute, which extrapolates to well over $300K per hour, according to Gartner) – losses which could be significantly reduced with the right anomaly detection systems.
The cost of downtime
Every online service runs using enormous amounts of code and numerous pieces of data going back and forth every second. In an ever-changing environment of microservices, complex data pipeline and elastic infrastructure, errors can always happen. No system is perfect and even the most technologically advanced organizations suffer from downtime.
When a service goes down, there are three fronts that are immediately affected: The first, and perhaps most obvious, is the financial front. A downed website stops generating revenue – and for businesses that are 100 percent online based, which is the case for many contemporary services, the losses could be quite heavy. The second front is customer satisfaction – it is safe to assume that in today’s culture of instant gratification, a potential customer will immediately look for alternatives if their first choice is down. Lastly is employee productivity. The average employee takes 23 minutes to refocus after an outage – significantly adding to the time already lost to downtime.
Solving the problem quickly (or before it happens)
Once realizing downtime is a threat to any organization’s online operations, certain measures could be taken. Anodot uses artificial intelligence to detect causes of downtime faster than any person could.
Quite a few of the world’s biggest brands use Anodot’s technology to continuously monitor online performance, and to detect irregularities that could end up causing downtime. Often, companies would employ Anodot’s solution alongside other monitoring tools, providing the opportunity to compare performance. So far, Anodot has been proven most effective.
For example, a popular ridesharing company which uses Anodot’s technology alongside other monitoring tools, reported that Anodot was able to detect an issue 23 hours before other services. The company says each hour of downtime related to this issue would have cost them $35,000. Other examples include a leading adtech company reporting Anodot detected an issue four hours earlier than their other monitoring tools and a well-known loan comparison service said Anodot was six hours faster.
Over the years, Anodot has provided services to a variety of companies across multiple industries. Many of its case studies are available here.
Running a smooth operation
It is easy to dismiss downtime issues by relying on solid code and accepting downtime as an unknown factor, to be dealt with if and when it arises. Perhaps the smarter solution is to always be prepared and stay constantly vigilant with a dedicated anomaly detection solution. Consider it your safety net.
The easiest way to summarize the importance of managing downtime is this – it costs you money. A minute of downtime can cost thousands of dollars, which could add up to hundreds of thousands, or even millions, over the course of a single day. Therefore, the importance of having the right monitoring service is paramount. Some anomalies can be detected before they bring a service down, enabling remediation before customer experience is seriously impacted. Issues that can not be dealt with preemptively should be solved as early as possible, which is why having a tool such as Anodot is a must for any organization.
Written by Avi Avital
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