How to maximize enterprise uptime (without adding headcount)

Better enterprise uptime can save time and money for a business, plus help the IT team focus on strategy and proactivity. 

Downtime represents wasted time for employees, extra time taken away from strategic work by IT, and tangible costs that affect the bottom line. A joint report from Splunk and Oxford Economics found that unplanned downtime costs Global 2000 enterprises $400 billion per year. The most significant direct cost was lost revenue, alongside regulatory fines, SLA penalties, and post-incident marketing spend to rebuild customer trust.

Keeping systems up and running for users has always been a core component of IT teams’ work. But ensuring enterprise uptime now isn’t about reacting to problems as they arise, or monitoring dashboards constantly. It’s about resolving issues before users notice, and becoming proactive about uptime so that technology doesn’t become a bottleneck or barrier.

Enterprise uptime keeps businesses running behind the scenes — the servers, networks, and endpoints that users rely on to do good work every day.

What enterprise uptime actually means

Enterprise uptime is defined by the specific amount of time that services are working as intended, measured as a percentage of 100% — what uptime would be if services were always fully available. The use of nines to represent uptime, usually from 99.0% to 99.999%, acknowledges that every IT system will encounter slowdowns or small issues at any given time.

In addition to uptime, it’s useful to understand availability, which includes the measurement of both uptime and scheduled maintenance in a system. So, for example, a server might have 99.999% uptime, but zero availability when it undergoes a scheduled reboot during working hours.

Understanding availability tiers and SLAs

When evaluating enterprise software, availability tiers are important to consider. Any provider offering a service-level agreement (SLA) should specify the percentage of uptime that will be guaranteed, or, how many minutes per month of downtime that’s allowed. There is an impactful difference between a typical uptime SLA of 99.9% vs. 99.99%.

Because an SLA is a binding contract between a service provider and its clients, the provider is accountable for penalties or service credits if uptime falls below the guaranteed percentage.

This table shows the differences between 99.0% (two nines) of availability and 99.999% (five nines) of availability. (It’s based on a 30-day calendar month and 365-day year.) This helps illuminate the real differences between the lowest vs. highest guaranteed availability.

Understanding uptime vs. observability vs. RMM

In addition to uptime and availability, it’s useful to understand observability and remote monitoring and management (RMM) when working to minimize IT downtime. Uptime can be calculated as a system availability metric for a range of tools and systems. Observability refers to the practice of monitoring and analyzing systems to understand why they are behaving a certain way. 

RMM technology focuses on infrastructure uptime, with tools that centrally monitor, manage, and secure distributed devices. It’s a way of preventing problems before they occur by getting ahead of tasks with automation, like deploying software, running remote troubleshooting scripts, and keeping tabs on the company’s hardware inventory. Because RMM works across the entire enterprise, it can enable more uptime and availability that benefits IT and other departments.This kind of RMM monitoring is what distinguishes an infrastructure-focused platform from a simple website or API uptime checker.

The real cost of IT downtime 

While the cost of IT downtime can be partially quantified in the availability numbers above, there are other factors to consider. Those include lost productivity, both in the IT team and across the entire company, SLA penalties, and brand reputation issues, such as if your customers can’t access what they need during downtime. 

When considering how to reduce server downtime, make sure to quantify the extended effects of availability problems. Every department suffers when there is too much or unexpected downtime, adding hidden costs.

Why reactive IT can’t protect uptime

Successful enterprise uptime strategies become easier when IT teams are more proactive than reactive. Typically, IT teams have operated using a ticket-driven model, where technicians address user issues as they come up in help desk tickets. 

But this reactivity has turned ticketing technology into a bottleneck, keeping people from doing their work and keeping IT from serving the business as a strategic partner. Worse, the archaic path of IT troubleshooting — detect, ticket, triage, and fix — is too slow to prevent downtime. IT teams also grapple with tool sprawl and blind spots between monitoring, ticketing, and patching systems. 

Proactivity is the goal, and moving away from a reactive IT model also helps to improve uptime.

The 5 pillars of enterprise uptime 

Ensuring as much uptime as possible is part of the modern IT team’s remit. When you’re exploring and evaluating tools to increase uptime and productivity and reduce costs across the enterprise, keep these five pillars in mind:

1. Real-time monitoring 

Work moves too quickly to monitor after the fact, and plenty of IT issues can spiral to create cascading problems. Server uptime monitoring and network uptime monitoring can both be done in real time. Real-time monitoring technology spans servers, networks, and endpoints, with a single pane of glass interface for IT teams to scan the full picture.

2. Proactive alerting 

In addition to monitoring in real time, IT teams can set up proactive alerting, customizing thresholds according to the company’s and users’ particular needs and goals. Proactive alerting works hand-in-hand with monitoring to catch potential problems before they can cause an outage or otherwise affect users.  

3. Automated patching 

Patching is a continual task for IT departments across industries, and while it may seem mundane, unpatched systems can lead to downtime and security exposure. Modern enterprise uptime systems can automate patching to stay ahead of vulnerabilities and take the burden off of IT teams to manually track and update patches.

4. Autonomous resolution

Another important pillar for modern IT teams: exploring technology that can actually perform root cause fixes. Tools like Robin by Atera can address the root cause of an issue before it becomes a downtime-causing incident. It integrates with RMM and other providers and can investigate the root cause and fix the problem independently for issues like password resets and software deployments.

5. Governance, audit trails, and uptime SLAs

SLAs remain an important part of enterprise uptime, with platforms able to ensure and track this metric. In addition, look for governed technology that follows pre-set rules and strict guidelines and provides audit trails, especially when using autonomous AI to solve issues, like Robin. 

How to choose an enterprise uptime solution

When it’s time to choose which enterprise uptime solution is best for your business, look for these features:

• Coverage across endpoint/device types
• Alert customization
• Patch automation
• Autonomous remediation
• Scalability
• Predictable pricing
• Compliance built-in
• SLAs with uptime guarantees

Finally, consider whether an all-in-one platform will work better for your business. Stitching together point solutions can work for some teams, but ultimately brings more integration and management work for IT. All-in-one platforms will only continue to be more useful as AI matures and becomes embedded with other capabilities like RMM and automation.

Getting ahead of downtime with Atera

Cutting down on downtime operationally requires a few different capabilities, all of which Atera includes in its platform. These include: real-time monitoring across endpoints; proactive alerting; automated patching; governance and audit trails; SLA guarantees; and autonomous resolutions to fix issues at the root cause.

Atera’s platform includes sophisticated RMM along with Robin, an autonomous layer that can find and resolve issues before they cause downtime, along with solving help desk tickets to free up IT teams’ time. Teams using Robin have seen a 92% autonomous resolution rate, with a two-minute average resolution time vs. 188 minutes human-only resolution time.

And, Robin allows IT teams to focus on strategic work, with a 40% IT workload reduction rate. Qualifying plans include a 99.9% uptime SLA. Atera serves 13,000 customers, with 6 million devices managed. See how Robin resolves your first ticket in 72 hours.