What’s the True Cost of IT Downtime?
For small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), when your IT goes down, it’s never good news. We don’t need to tell you that. But, how bad is it? As it turns out, downtime can be downright catastrophic. According to a 2016 survey by Gartner, a technology research and advisory firm, small businesses with 50 million or less in annual revenue put the price tag of an hour-long outage at $8,600. And if there’s data loss in addition to just downtime? Then the costs really add up. Gartner reports that a whopping 43% of SMBs shut their doors right after a major data loss. And 51% go out of business for good within two years.
You needn’t be an Amazon-type business that’s wholly online to feel the impact of data loss either. Just imagine that you didn’t have access to client records or sales contacts… the impact on your customers, and ultimately your reputation, has far reaching consequences. Even an hour of IT downtime can take up to three months for a business to recover, according to Nationwide Insurance. Customers are used to operating in a wireless, one-click world, and have little patience for anything less than immediacy. As a result, you’ll likely lose some customers, who may be hard to lure back, even when you’re fully operational again. And any new leads in the pipeline are lost, too. The odds are truly stacked against businesses that fail to plan for IT downtime and data loss. While it’s a cliché, it’s true: the best offense is a good defense, and that applies to your business continuity plan, too. You can avoid outages in the first place, with a managed IT support subscription that monitors your network for problems. With a remote monitoring connectivity agent in place, you’re protected again viruses and spyware, and know that all security patches are up to date, plus the added peace-of-mind of a help desk and IT onsite support if needed—it’s a much more cost-effective solution that trying to get back up and running with the help of a traditional IT support tech, who has an hourly rate that will rack up quickly. The other critical piece of the puzzle is reliable backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution to ensure that the data is both backed up and retrievable. While you can’t prevent all IT downtime, with these solutions in place, you can certainly prevent a lot of the headaches.
To find out more about business continuity and other technology solutions for SMBs, including a FREE trial of remote monitoring software, call 1-866-422-0511