It is a significant fact that no matter how advanced the IT gets, businesses would still encounter downtime that would affect them in various ways. Let it be a small business or a huge enterprise, downtime leads to a series of problems that are difficult to cope with.
Downtime is often a result of hardware failure, crashes or natural catastrophes. It is a common and inevitable problem most IT businesses face. It is the period when the system is completely out of order. The unavailability of essential systems might lead to lost revenues and customers, additional costs, less productivity and more. The longer your company goes through downtime, the more you are likely to lose your reputation.
What is the true cost of downtime?
Most organisations avoid implementing a backup system that could restore their important data during downtime. The confidential information is the true asset of an organisation. It may include old records, customer information, financial reports and more. A downtime might lead to losing all the data, thus leaving nothing behind. It might destroy software programs that include CRM, ERP and more.
According to IDC- the global market research firm, 40% of the small to medium sized businesses do not backup their data. Businesses that have no recovery system suffer a lot when they encounter a downtime. They must spend a lot of time and money to recreate the data that has been lost. Moreover, repairing systems is another issue that needs to be sorted out.
The cost of the downtime depends on the business size. Studies show that small companies lose £5,600 per hour during an event of downtime. It is also estimated that in the UK, the downtime costs businesses £10.5 billion per year.
The downtime cost can be analysed by calculating the amount of money lost each hour. It is more costly for IT businesses that mainly rely on the data centres to deliver networking services to their customers.
Here is the widely used formula for analysing the IT downtime cost for your organisation:
Estimated average cost of hour of downtime= employee costs per hour x fraction employees affected by outage x average revenue per hour x fraction revenue affected by outage
Any business that goes through a downtime needs to spend money to fix the issue and get the system running again. Moreover, business owners need to do overtime to make up for the loss that has been done. They have to give overtime wages to the employees that give extra hours to overcome the loss.
Downtime also leads to compensatory costs. Most business owners, offer free products or discounts to satisfy their frustrated customers.
We offer professional services to enhance your business performance by minimising downtime. A company might suffer a huge loss if it encounters a prolonged downtime. It is important to support and maintain your IT systems so that they can contribute to increasing the productivity of your organisation.
We offer a range of services to strengthen your business. Contact us now to make your business safe from losses or downtimes.
Please feel free to contact us and learn more about what services we can offer!