Anything that disrupts the normal flow of business operations and effects mission-critical systems and systems used by employees to do their daily work is considered downtime.
While natural disasters account for 2-3% of interruptions, the most common impact factors resulting in significant downtime are IT related – 42% hardware failures, 30% human error, 14% software errors or corruption, and 7% security breaches. After a major disaster, an average company will lose 25% of its daily revenue in the first five days, and up to 40% if it lasts up to 24 days (Source: University of Texas).
IT outages can be frequent and lengthy, and can cause damage to a company’s reputation, staff morale, and customer loyalty. Considering the loss of transactional revenue (yearly sales ÷ by 125,280 (60 min x 8 hours x 261 days) = avg. per minute cost of downtime), cost of repairs, and loss of business opportunities, it’s important for businesses and entrepreneurs to think about the cost of downtime and take more proactive steps to mitigate the risks.
Finding a prevention strategy starts with thinking about continuous, proactive network solutions and backup disaster recovery planning. Proactive IT management and monitoring can help you easily detect issues that may lead to network outages in the future. When you have identified network issues at early stages, you can take informed decisions and fix them before they build up into detrimental downtime. Gartner estimated the hourly cost of network downtime for large corporations was $42,000, with a typical business experiencing an average of 87 hours of downtime a year, resulting in estimated losses exceeding $3.6 million. Even 99% availability, as good as it sounds, still means 3.65 days of downtime per year, or 7.2 hours a month, or 1.68 hours a week; the goal should be as close to 100% as theoretically possible.
Occasional downtime effecting internet access, phones and email has a direct effect on your businesses ability to reach customers, and downtime from larger impact scenarios like loss of company data, can prolong the negative effects. If disaster strikes, having a good off-site backup solution is a key security measure to avoid data loss, minimize downtime and perform data restoration to get you and your company up and running quickly!
Be empowered to make proactive instead of reactive choices and ask about Accent Imaging’s Managed Network Services, featuring: 24 x 7 monitoring and support, 8a-5p onsite support, cloud backup, and preventative maintenance & security. Learn more at www.networkoncommand.com