Whenever your operations aren’t fully functional, that means downtime for your business.
Downtime can be severe, such as a natural disaster knocking out power to your building for several days or weeks, or it can be more subtle, coming in the form of smaller short-term outages from hard drive crashes or internet signal problems.
Technology equipment that’s not proactively managed and monitored ultimately suffers more downtime than its counterpart that is under a managed IT service plan.
No matter the size or duration of the downtime, it’s costing your Lake Okeechobee area company money, and usually more than you think.
The average cost of downtime ranges from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour.
Downtime costs start at $140,000 per hour for smaller businesses and can go as high as $540,000 per hour. The average cost of IT downtime ends up being $336,000 per hour, or $5,600 every minute.
Where are those costs coming from?
Downtime can impact a number of areas, and those costs accumulate. These include:
- Loss of productivity: If your employees can’t work as usual due to IT problems, that results in productivity losses for your business.
- Loss of sales opportunities: If your website or phone system is down, new customers wanting to place an order or hire your services can’t reach you and move on to a competitor.
- Loss of customer trust: Existing customers that are impacted by your outage may lose trust in you and seek an alternative.
- Urgent repair costs: When downtime happens out of the blue, you’re usually paying for urgent repair costs to get back up and running as fast as possible.
- Missed delivery deadlines: If you’re on a contract to deliver your product or service on a specific timeline, you can suffer penalties due to a missed deadline caused by downtime.
- Data breach cleanup: If your downtime is due to malware or a data breach, that can result in additional cleanup costs and IT forensics to determine the nature and depth of the attack.
- Data recovery costs: If a downtime incident results in data loss and you don’t have a backup copy, recreating that data (if even possible) can mean weeks or months of additional employee time.
- Data privacy penalties: Downtime that is the result of a data breach or data leakage incident can mean penalties from compliance violations with guidelines like HIPAA or FINRA.
How to Mitigate Downtime at Your Business
The old adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is definitely true when it comes to business downtime. The best way to avoid unexpected downtime and all those associated costs is to take steps to mitigate outages and keep your business protected.
Here are four ways you can protect yourself against costly outages.
Back Up Your Data Properly
The average failure rate of backing up all of company data is 75%. While most companies know that they need to back up data, many of them make mistakes that result in data loss, even though they thought they were covered.
Some of these mistakes include:
- Not having at least one backup offsite (cloud backup)
- Not monitoring backups for any glitches
- Running out of backup space without realizing it
- Not including cloud services in backups
- Not regularly testing the recovery of a backup
Ensuring you have a backup of all your data that’s done at least daily and that is tested regularly can go a long way towards reducing downtime in the event of a ransomware attack or other data loss incident.
Signing up for Managed IT Services
Managed IT services offer you several benefits in a single plan, and these services all help reduce the chance of downtime, in addition to keeping your technology running efficiently. These include:
- Your equipment and network are monitored for any signs of impending issues so they can be addressed proactively before downtime occurs.
- Security patches and updates are managed for you to improve the security of your technology infrastructure.
- Employees have a tech support person they can call to get help with a tech issue fast, rather than spending valuable time struggling with it themselves.
Smart Use of Cloud Services
While you can’t keep a natural disaster like a hurricane from happening, you can put cloud systems in place that will allow you to quickly move your operations so you’re still open for business to people calling in or visiting your website.
VoIP phones and cloud software, like Office 365 and QuickBooks Online, can be accessed from any internet connected location and any device, which allows you to access your critical operational infrastructure, even if you can’t do it from your main office.
Put Strong Cybersecurity in Place
Some of the biggest threats to businesses these days come from the online world. This includes things like ransomware attacks, data breaches, viruses, and more.
Protect yourself by ensuring you have strong cybersecurity safeguards in place, including things like a firewall, web protection, advanced anti-malware, and mobile device and IoT protection.
Do You Want to Reduce Your Downtime Risk This year?
Cris’s Tech Repair can help your Okeechobee area business put safeguards in place to reduce your risk of downtime and all those associated costs.
Contact us today for a free technology consultation. Call 561-985-4961 or contact us online.