07/09/2014

Do The Companies You Do Business with Utilize Website Monitoring Services?

Last week, companies that use Intuit's QuickBase project management services found out that it isn't only their own website they have to worry about when it comes to website downtime. If your business's productivity relies heavily upon an online program such as QuickBase, you need to worry about the downtime of the service provider that you use as well. The productivity of several businesses were ground to a halt while the QuickBase online project management application was unavailable during an unexpected outage. Being unable to access and share crucial files and information meant lost profits for the companies who use the service, and lost pay for the contractors and employees who work for those companies on a pay-for-performance basis.

What Happened to QuickBase?

There was really no communication as to why the QuickBase sites went down or what was being done to get those sites back up and running. Users of the service would try to access their project management pages, where vital files and records are often stored, and not be able to get in. For some companies, this literally stopped workflow in its tracks. The service was only down for a few hours, but when it comes to time-sensitive projects with tight deadlines, a few hours can mean the difference between a happy client and a huge disaster.

Your Downtime is Not the Only Downtime You Need to Worry About

If your company utilizes online services, such as Intuit's QuickBase project management and CRM solutions, you need to look into what a company does to ensure their uptime before you trust your business's productivity, profits, and bottom line to any service. While the company may be able to tell you exactly how their online platforms can make your business more productive and more profitable, they don't always tell you the measures they have put in place (or have not put in place) to ensure that the service stays up and running. It is your job to protect your business's profits, so it is your job to ask these question before signing up for any online service that your business will come to rely on. If you decide that your business needs to use any cloud-based service, whether it's a project management service, CRM solutions, or even IT management, you need to make sure that the business has website monitoring service in place so you can be secure in the knowledge that the service will handle any downtime as quickly as you would handle the downtime of your own site. If you have website monitoring service in place for your site, you know just how crucial it is to the success of your company. You need to make sure that the online services that you use are also utilizing website monitoring services to keep the internal operations of your business up and running at all times.