, Can Your Business Afford Downtime?

Can Your Business Afford Downtime?

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Calculate the True Cost of Downtime

According to the Aberdeen Group, a business intelligence research firm, downtime is costing companies 65% more per hour these days than just two years ago. 2012 data calculated downtime costs at the $165,000 mark compared to the $100,000 of 2010.

According to Symantec’s 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, small businesses lose an average of $3,000 each day from owned systems and networks. Medium sized businesses bleed even more money, losing an average of $23,000 each day., Can Your Business Afford Downtime?

C-Suite management at SMBs must consider both the direct and indirect costs of downtime. Direct costs are:

  • Wasted wages paid to idle employees
  • Sales lost during the outages
  • The expensive emergency service/repair bill issued by the on-call IT technician brought in to get your business back up and running.

Indirect costs, such as lost customers who have moved on after one too many “Our server is down” messages, are more difficult to quantify but more costly – equating to roughly 62% of all network downtime costs. A specific dollar amount cannot be placed on lost productivity, the long-term consequences of damaged reputation and wasted opportunities that accompany each downtime event.

This is why Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT support alike don’t have the visibility or insight to understand what the average downtime event truly costs them. The residual effects of a network outage are typically much more costly than costs related to identifying the root cause of the failure and repairing or replacing any physical hardware.

But so many C-level executives remain mindful of only what downtime costs them in terms of repair or replacement costs. They also tend to gloss over the fact that their day-to-day business processes are more susceptible to outages and inaccessible data than they think.

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