How to Fortify Your Business’s Online Infrastructure Against Downtime

As we saw in February, when more than 350 U.S. government websites were offline, downtime can cause major disruptions, upset, and even lawsuits. For businesses, downtime can be as damaging as a large percentage relies on their online presence to convert leads and bring in new customers. This means a strong, resilient online setup is more than just useful for your business. It’s also an essential element your company needs to sell products, keep your team and clients connected, and ensure your sensitive business data is secure.

When your online infrastructure goes down, it can cause lengthy delays, cost you money, and potentially damage your brand’s reputation. This can harm your audience’s confidence in you and your ability to generate profit and keep your business afloat.

There are many reasons for online infrastructure downtime. Preparing for these eventualities can help you to protect your assets and prevent costly downtime proactively. This guide shows you practical ways to fortify your company’s online infrastructure and ensure your systems run reliably, no matter what the future brings.

The Risks of Online Infrastructure Downtime

Downtime refers to periods when your IT infrastructure is non-functional or functioning sub-optimally. These periods can significantly impair your business’s productivity, particularly if it uses these systems to sell services and products online.

Every period of downtime you experience can cost you revenue and impact your outputs, leading to delays, bottlenecks, and other challenges. Your workflows could also be slowed to a halt until your systems can be repaired.

While financial losses are a key risk of IT downtime, they aren’t the only risk present. These outages can also harm your business’s reputation with your customers, clients, and leads. With data showing 81% of customers consider trust a “very important” factor in choosing whether or not to use a company, maintaining trust is vital for your success.

Service delays, non-functional websites, and slow loading times can frustrate your visitors and, in some cases, cause a loss of confidence and trust in your brand. If you experience a cyberattack or breach, your leads may also be left hesitant about your ability to keep their data secure.

Identifying Your Viable Risk Level

The first step to protecting your online infrastructure against downtime is to assess just how much downtime risk is viable for your business. Understanding how much downtime you can realistically afford is important for developing a sound IT strategy. Your viable downtime limit will define your tolerance to risk and allow you to direct your resources toward systems that keep your systems running optimally as far as possible.

The average accepted downtime rate for a website is just 0.05%. That means your systems should experience uptime at least 99.95% of the time. If you have a low risk tolerance – say, for instance, if you rely on an ecommerce platform to generate revenue – investing in IT continuity technology is essential for keeping downtime minimal.

If you have a higher risk tolerance, you could instead focus on maintaining your software and equipment and allowing for longer downtime periods in emergency situations. The latter strategy will ensure you can adequately repair your systems to minimize the risk of downtime in the future.

The Leading Causes of Downtime and How to Fortify Your Business Against Them

Many factors can cause a business’s online infrastructure to go down. Here are some of the most common causes and how to address them to protect your systems.

1. Hardware Failures

Hardware and network failures are some of the leading causes of downtime. Elements like servers and switches form the foundations of network stability. When they fail, all connected devices will experience downtime and technical issues.

Regularly maintaining your business’s network hardware is important to avoid these issues and maximize your uptime. Consider also replacing outdated and redundant equipment to minimize the number of potential weak points in your systems.

2. Unstable Software

While rare, software failures can cause significant periods of downtime. If your business’s software is aging or no longer receiving security updates, these factors can leave it prone to technical errors, security risks, and failures.

The key to addressing this is frequently updating your software with the latest versions or patches. Hiring an internal IT specialist or software management team can also help you to keep your critical software up to date and eliminate your risk of software-related downtime.

3. Third-Party Service Issues

The number of public cloud services has increased by 50% in the last three years, and by 2027, the cloud computing market is estimated to be worth $1,240.9 billion. With such immense growth, it’s easy to see why most connected businesses now rely on third-party services for their network connectivity.

However, these services, which also include internet providers and service hosts, can experience downtime themselves. When they fail, they will automatically cause the failure of your IT infrastructure, and your systems will only be back up and running when theirs have been repaired.

If you are experiencing these challenges, consider switching service providers to stabilize your systems. Research the most reliable providers available and check out customer reviews to gauge their service levels and the responsiveness of their customer support.

You can also verify their service guarantees or establish a secondary cloud service or network provider as a backup. If your primary service should fail, you can switch over to your secondary service to reduce the impact of these technical problems on your business.

4. Cyber Threats and Attacks

In 2024, 67% of businesses reported an increase in cyber incidents, with the average number of attacks rising from 63 to 66. The proliferation of artificial intelligence has also made these breaches more difficult to identify.

Cyber threats, such as ransomware attacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attempts, and fraudulent activities, can severely impair your online infrastructure and business systems.

Performing Security Audits

The first step to safeguarding your organization against cyberattacks is to regularly audit your network security measures. This helps to spot vulnerabilities and address them, ensuring your IT systems are always protected against continuously advancing threats.

Begin by creating a map of your existing network infrastructure, including all of its user access points, hardware, and software. This map will allow you to keep track of changes and quickly identify unauthorized changes and additions.

Next, review your access control protocols and assess who can access important systems and information. Adjust these permissions to ensure they protect your systems, and revoke access for anyone with outdated roles or who no longer works in your company. Implementing multi-factor authentication will also add an additional security layer to these systems and ensure only authorized personnel can access them.

You can also consider using automation tools to scan your networks for vulnerabilities and security holes. These tools can automatically run continuous scans in the background and alert you to threats in real time. Once you receive an alert, address the issue immediately to safeguard your infrastructure.

Implementing Encryption Protocols

Once you have optimized your access controls, you should also adopt strong encryption protocols to keep your data secure while being stored and shared. Encryption converts data into code to ensure that, even if it is intercepted, it cannot be interpreted or used. This method is vital for protecting sensitive and personal data, including financial records, banking details, and customer information.

Security experts recommend encrypting your data both during transit and in storage. Stored data can be protected using tools like advanced encryption standard software. Use a protocol like transport layer security (TLS) to safeguard shared data in transit and keep your online communications secure. If you have created backups of your data, encrypting these is essential too.

Training Employees on Best Practices

Simply fortifying your systems is not enough to prevent cyberattacks. You also need to train your employees and anyone with access to your systems on how to use them securely. Train staff on best practices like:

• Password usage. Ensure your staff members know how to create and store strong, unique passwords for every business account they use. Recommend they use a password manager to automatically generate and store passwords.
• Safe communication. Educate your staff on how to communicate securely online through all major channels, including video calls, messaging platforms, and emails. Encourage them to use secure, encrypted communication platforms and to avoid sharing private information over unsecured channels.
• Phishing and digital fraud identification. Phishing emails and malicious links are major risks to IT infrastructure. Instruct your employees on how to spot these attempts and how to report them immediately.
• Software maintenance. Your employees must understand the importance of frequently updating their software to maintain robust security. Many cyber criminals take advantage of vulnerabilities in out-of-date software. Ensure your team knows how to keep their platforms up to date at all times to mitigate these risks.

5. Storms, Disasters, and Extreme Weather

Unexpected disasters and extreme weather events can disrupt the functioning of your IT infrastructure. Although it’s impossible to control these events, you can prepare for them proactively. Create backups of all of your business’s data and store these backups off-site and on a cloud storage platform. This ensures even if your physical systems are damaged beyond repair, you can still access and restore your organizational data while reducing downtime.

Adequate insurance coverage will also help to protect your infrastructural hardware against damage. With the right insurance plan, your hardware will be replaced as soon as possible, allowing you to get your systems back up and running rapidly.

In Summary

According to Cockroach Labs’ The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness report, 100% of senior technology executives surveyed reported suffering downtime-related revenue losses in 2024 and 2025. The costs of each of these outages range from $10,000 to well over $1,000,000 – a stark reminder of the risks of IT downtime.

While these risks are real and growing, fortifying your business’s online infrastructure is the key to mitigating them and protecting your finances. Use the guide above to optimize your organization’s protection and lay the foundations for uninhibited future growth.