How high availability mitigates the risks of application downtime

Delivering IT infrastructure that’s highly available, performant and secure is paramount for organizations of all sizes competing in today’s dynamic application landscape. With applications at the core of business operations, users expect them to be available 24/7.

Keeping these applications online and responsive so users enjoy the best application experience is vital to organizations' financial, reputational and operational health. 

Downtime is a serious business risk. Aside from lost sales and productivity, the cost of missed business opportunities and reputational damage is even greater now.

A study shows that 17 percent of consumers abandon their orders during the checkout process due to a website crashing or having errors. After all, a competitor is a few clicks away.

However, organizations should not have to put up with these problematic by-products of complex systems. Deploying load balancers to manage access to your application servers can help reduce the risk of unplanned downtime.

Business impacts of unplanned downtime

When applications go offline, this downtime can be caused by various factors, such as hardware failure, software issues, human error or -- more alarmingly -- cyberattacks. Regardless of the reason for application downtime, the effects can damage your business. 

Some of the impacts of unplanned downtime include:

•Lost productivity

When applications are offline and staff cannot effectively perform their roles, the outage impacts productivity. This downtime will typically have additional effects for others in the organization, and even business partners are affected when an offline application blocks workflows. In extreme cases, application downtime can paralyze operations, leading to forced shutdowns on the factory floor in manufacturing businesses. The additional costs of restarting a production line can be very costly.

•Reputational damage

People using applications expect a seamless and uninterrupted service, and they may switch to a competitor’s service if outages are frequent. If downtime is caused by a cyberattack that results in a data breach, reputational damage can be significant.

•Lost sales

When disgruntled users of an online shopping application move to other services because of slow response time, the result is lost revenue. Studies reveal that 50 percent of customers will abandon their online shopping carts if web pages don't load in six seconds. This illustrates that an application doesn't have to be offline completely to have an adverse impact. 

•Missed business opportunities

In addition to direct sales loss, an offline or slow application with a poor user experience will lead to missed business opportunities. Potential clients using your web application as part of their product evaluation process will move to competitors if their user experience isn’t top-notch. The same applies to potential B2B partners using your online applications to see if they could work with your organization. 

•Hidden costs

Beyond lost sales, additional costs can accrue due to unplanned application downtime. One overlooked cost is the IT team's time and resources to analyze, troubleshoot and fix any issue. In response to an emergency, planned activities and projects designed to improve the business may be delayed or abandoned. For the most severe outages for Fortune 1000 companies, downtime costs can run millions of dollars per hour.

How to deliver high availability 

With massive amounts of traffic today surging to applications, such as e-commerce websites, the norm to deliver high availability is to use load balancers to distribute requests to multiple backend application servers. This is the case, regardless of whether the backend application servers are physical, virtual or running as microservices in containers. A load balancer sits in front of the backend application servers, accepts incoming access requests from clients and distributes them across the backend server pool.

A load balancer can be deployed as software or hardware to a device that distributes client connections between servers. It acts as a “reverse proxy” representing the application servers to the client through a virtual IP address (VIP). Load balancers can provide both availability and scalability to the application, enabling it to scale beyond the capacity of a single server. The load balancer steers the traffic to a pool of available servers through various load-balancing algorithms. If more resources are needed, additional servers can be added.

Marshaling traffic and other benefits of load balancers

The load balancing software uses various intelligent algorithms and network traffic monitoring to share the incoming client requests across the server pool to keep applications available. They perform a health check on an application on the server to determine its availability. These client requests aren’t sent to servers that are too busy and can’t handle them. If the health check fails, the load balancer takes that instance of the application out of its pool of available servers. As the application returns online, the health check once again validates its availability, and the server is put back into the availability pool.

Due to the load balancer being positioned between the client and application server and managing the connection, it can perform other advantageous functions. For instance, it can perform content switching and provide content-based security, such as web application firewalls (WAF) and authentication enhancements like two-factor authentication (2FA). The benefits of improving application security cannot be overstated.

Taking a strategic approach to counter downtime

With the technology available, it's now easier to keep applications better secured and online. By strategically deploying load balancers to manage access to their application servers, tech leaders can reduce the risk of unplanned downtime for business-critical applications. Deploying Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) will distribute application traffic across geographically spread data centers to mitigate the risk of a disaster taking the entire application experience offline.

It’s also important to consider a load balancing solution that works for the business’s specific needs. Since 65 percent of organizations say their cloud environment is multi-cloud, enterprise IT decision-makers should deploy a versatile, secure and cost-efficient load balancing solution that is capable of modernizing cloud infrastructure while working with existing on-premises assets.

Photo Credit: Tang Yan Song/Shutterstock

James Rago is Product Manager, Principal, Progress.