As the Perseverance rockets at rapid speeds en route to Mars, NASA has committed to sharing regular real-time updates.

Here on Earth, our business initiatives are not on such interstellar scale, but the data, and the trusty systems we rely on to store and manage data, are similarly vital.

But what about if the tech doesn’t work?

Outages and IT downtime not only undermine the bottom-line as customers’ purchase power is limited, but bring harmful interruptions to business systems and relationships.

Effective data management in today’s digitised world must be frequent and intelligent, according to independent research by global data protection leader Veeam.

Customers are looking to the cloud for both the ability to manage important data and respond quickly. The cloud economy involves its own technology, systems and enabling software designed to dynamically and flexibly achieve data and application recovery – no matter where your systems are at now.

Downtime hits where it hurts – the bottom line. In the report, for production applications marked by the surveyed businesses as “high priority”, just one hour of downtime is expected to cost $67,651.

Loss of customer confidence – the #1 impact of downtime

Outages and IT downtime not only undermines the bottom-line as customers’ purchase power is limited but interrupt – and could damage –  business relationships.

The most common negative effect and concern with downtime was a loss of customer confidence, at 51%. Other impacts include damages to band integrity, diverted resources, legal action, reduced stock price and revocation of licences.

Local businesses are using more robotic automation

A recent poll of Australia and New Zealand businesses asked how they’re using automation both before and after the pandemic.  It indicates that automation could be key to flattening the recovery curve.

The IDC Asia Pacific IT Services Survey 2020 found A/NZ businesses are beating the curve, largely because their preferred tool is robotic process automation.

Robotic process automation – automating repetitive tasks without human intervention – is typical in areas such as network automation, data manipulation, fraud detection and payroll.

In IDC’s COVID-19 Impact on IT Spending Survey, Wave 5, June 2020 report, they use a Five Stages of Recovery model to track businesses movement through various recovery stages. These stages include the COVID crisis, economic slowdown, recession, return to growth, and the next normal.

They found that intelligence automation assists businesses to progress with digital transformation initiatives, especially recovery and return to a growth phase.

These findings indicate positive outlooks for businesses looking to adapt quickly in the face of disruption from COVID-19.

IDC has stated that businesses should explore how robotic process automation can increase business resilience.

“Changing your business by using automation is much faster than changing your business using people,” says IDC A/NZ senior research manager Monica Collier.

Not all data is – or can be – flexible, but ensuring accessibility of data and resources is essential. Well protected data systems will also have high availability.

While most businesses have don’t have the global pressure or complexities of space travel, they do have customers who expect instant communication and service. As capabilities expand, customer expectations increase – outages are unacceptable.

Uptime matters to all businesses, be they big or small – and in the digital world of real-time, data availability and accessibility is more important than it has ever been before.