How to Make High Availability for EAMs a Reality
Companies rely on their Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system to make decisions about their vital equipment and resources. If you can’t access current and accurate information, you can’t run efficiently. Equipment can’t be located. Your business falls behind on necessary repairs and routine maintenance. The next thing you know, your projects are running overtime and over budget, because you don’t have the tools to complete them.
Achieving high availability is the solution to this problem. Your goal is to eliminate downtime so your EAM data is always available. However, natural disasters, equipment failures, human error, power outages, and bad actors can all disrupt your business continuity. Running your EAM in the cloud can provide the high level of availability your company needs to reliably conduct business and win your customers’ trust and confidence.
What Is High Availability Anyway?
The Journal of Cloud Computing defines the standards of high availability as the “five nines” or 99.999% availability. Achieving this standard of availability means your business will experience fewer than 5.25 minutes a year of downtime.
Downtime is expensive. In a recent report, IHS Markit, a marketing analyst firm, found that IT downtime costs organizations in the U.S. a total of $700 billion per year. These costs include loss of production and dwindling customer confidence. For your business to stay profitable, you need to achieve the highest level of availability possible.
Boosting Availability with the Cloud
One of the biggest barriers to availability is having a single point of failure. If one part of the system shuts down or becomes overloaded, the whole system goes down. Hosting your EAM in the cloud allows your company to provision backup servers so you can achieve automatic failover. Replicating servers and data in the cloud allows you to recover data quickly and resume production.
The cloud also enables load balancing. If one server fails, traffic can be rerouted to another server without interruption.
In the case of a workload spike or a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the cloud provides the network bandwidth necessary to accommodate the excess traffic. A DDoS attack works by enlisting botnets to overwhelm a network with queries so that it becomes inaccessible to employees, clients, or customers. The cloud can absorb this attack and allow your company to remain in operation.
Cloud Disaster Recovery
High availability reduces the duration of an outage to minutes or seconds per year. However, a disaster like a major power failure, hurricane, or flood could knock your systems out for days or weeks, crippling your business.
The cloud offers disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to prevent a catastrophic event from shutting your company down. With the cloud, your business can create off-site backup without having to build a physical datacenter. When a disaster affects your physical location, your EAM system remains untouched, allowing for swift and complete recovery.
Keeping Your EAM Up and Running
Even if you aren’t worried about having your EAM data stolen or compromised by hackers, you should be concerned about whether information will be available when you must use it to make important decisions. The cloud offers both the backup and bandwidth resources your business needs to maintain seamless operations.
With its lengthy experience in providing EAM solutions, Intelligent Technology Solutions (ITS) is the ideal partner for companies looking to run their EAM systems in the cloud. ITS provides military-grade security in its hosted datacenters. To ensure that your EAM data will be available anytime you need it no matter what happens, your data is stored in multiple geographical locations.
Is your company’s level of availability where it needs to be? Contact ITS for a free consultation.
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