Understanding and Addressing the Causes of Application Outages

Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series is a collection of contributed articles written by thought leaders in enterprise technology. Christian Simko of AppViewX offers an overview of common causes of application outages and how to address them.

While enterprise organizations in every vertical market depend upon data to make critical business decisions, it is applications that generate data, process it, and truly power operations. Application availability is essential for employee productivity and customer interaction. When applications go down, business processes can come to a grinding halt.

Putting a cost to application downtime is often tricky due to a multitude of factors. These can range from the type of business (retail, manufacturing, energy, technology, financial services, etc.) to how critical the impacted application is to operations. If an office productivity application goes down, what is the impact compared to downtime for a customer-facing application?

Understanding and Addressing the Causes of Application Outages

The Cost of Application Outages

Some of the cost factors to consider when calculating the cost of downtime include:

• Lost Employee Productivity: Essential application failures impact work
• Lost Business Revenue: Application failures can lead to significant revenue losses
• Customer Experience Impact: Downtime can strain customer relations and lead to lost business and fines
• Negative Brand Reputation: In the digital era, a single grievance online can tarnish a company’s image

As a baseline, a Veeam Software survey found that organizations consider 51 percent of their data as ‘High Priority’ versus ‘Normal’. An hour of downtime for a High Priority application was estimated to cost $67,651, while this number was $61,642 for a Normal application. Based on the above cost factors, these numbers may be on the low side. A survey by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) indicated that a single hour of downtime can cost between $1 million to over $5 million.

Common Causes of Downtime

As enterprise environments become complex, various teams, including NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and CloudOps, are responsible for application delivery. Unfortunately, they’re not always in sync. This can lead to technical glitches, human errors, and misconfigurations that result in downtime.

Here is a list of the ten leading causes of application downtime:

1. Hardware or Infrastructure Failures affecting servers, load balancers, or network devices.
2. Software Bugs, including coding errors, compatibility issues, and security vulnerabilities, can compromise applications.
3. Network Connectivity Issues, such as malfunctioning routers, switches, or firewalls, can disrupt applications.
4. Database Issues, including performance glitches or data corruption, can make applications falter.
5. Cybersecurity Attacks can render an application unusable.
6. Human Error, such as inadvertent changes, can disrupt application functionality.
7. Cloud Service Outages can impact application availability.
8. Traffic Spikes can make applications unresponsive.
9. Planned Maintenance can temporarily affect application availability.
10. Natural Disasters and Power Outages can shut down applications.

Proactively preventing downtime starts with regular system audits. Periodic inspections of infrastructure, configurations, vulnerabilities, and potential points of failure can identify problems before they occur. In addition, organizations should implement failover systems and maintain a consistent backup schedule for critical data. Implementing real-time monitoring tools can also help preemptively identify potential issues, while load balancing can distribute incoming application traffic evenly across multiple servers, ensuring optimal responsiveness.

Scheduling routine maintenance during off-peak hours is equally important for preventing unnecessary disruptions. Before any new application or update is deployed, it should be rigorously tested in a staging environment to catch potential bugs or vulnerabilities. Unexpected traffic spikes can also lead to downtime. Having strategies in place to scale resources based on demand can prevent outages. To anticipate and respond effectively to emergencies, companies should have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that is reviewed and updated periodically.

Final Thoughts

The role of digital certificate lifecycle management is indispensable for averting application outages. Certificates are the foundation of digital trust for securing communication and verifying the authenticity of websites, applications, servers, and various connected devices. Expired certificates are a common cause of application outages, disrupted operations, and compromised security. As businesses deploy more services online and applications become interconnected, the sheer number of certificates in use quickly escalates.

Proactively managing the lifecycle of these certificates — ensuring timely renewals, proper installations, and revocations — becomes crucial to preventing security weaknesses and eliminating outages. It’s not just about security; it’s about operational resilience. Automated processes are essential to keeping track of and managing certificates, ensuring application availability, enabling secure access, and preventing the costly repercussions of unplanned outages. Recognizing the causes of application downtime enables organizations to strategize appropriately. By embracing automation, orchestration, and collaboration among all operational teams, businesses can significantly mitigate downtime risks, ensuring streamlined operations and maintaining customer trust.