Blog 3

IT Concepts: Downtime

“Downtime is costly” - my supervisor

What is Downtime?

The dreaded issue of downtime is always present in any field. Its very definition can vary between industry, organization, system, and person. In the grand scheme of things, downtime is essentially an event where a certain system, network, or application, is unaccessible or unusable. Ofcourse there are different “levels” of down time, like Adobe Reader application becoming corrupted preventinga user from reading a pdf, or a straight up power outage at in a dedicated server room. There’s a wide scope of factors that categorize certain situations of downtime. Nonetheless, no matter the duration or impact of downtime, it’s definitely not good.

Personal Account: Downtime, A Constant Dilemma

This blog topic came to me during work. I was in the process of migrating user profile data from an old machine to a new one. The user very irritated with my presence. I could tell because when I first greeted her, she said sarcastically “oh wonderful… IT is here. Are you here to fix or to cause problems”. I was slightly insulted, but ignored it, and proceeded with completeing her migration. Not a very pleasant interaction.

You see, within a hospital environment, downtime is not only a monetary issue, it could possibly be considered a matter of life and death, so no pressure. HAHA. At work, my team and I handle a bunch of issues in relation to some sort of downtime. After weeks of soft-minded thoughts on the topic, I’ve come to the conclusion that IT, traditionally, both mitigates and literally is downtime.

There are so many situations where I am reducing, or contributing to downtime. Assisting a user with a application permissions? A mitigation of downtime. Conducting a migration from Windows 7 to 10? Downtime. Upgrading the physical hardware? Downtime. You can not escape the reality of downtime. Therefore you must embrace it and be proud that as IT you are a downtime-facilitating warrior.