‘Downtime’ is the dreaded expression for businesses, which indicates any number of IT problems but always results in a loss of profit. Whether it’s a server failure or the result of a cyber hack, even a relatively short amount of downtime can have serious consequences for businesses. Are you doing enough to protect your company from the impact of downtime?
According to the EMC Global Data Protection Index, which surveyed over 3,000 IT decision makers across 24 countries, downtime and data loss costs the UK £10.5 billion annually. 60% of enterprises surveyed had suffered downtime in the last year, with consequences reported including loss of revenue and loss of customer confidence or loyalty.
Consumers expect to access your services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the systems go down, depending on the size of the business you could be losing money per second or minute.
If you’re interested in calculating the exact cost of downtime to your business, there are now a number of online tools to help you. You’ll usually need to input your annual revenue, the amount of revenue from online purchases and the amount of high revenue hours per day, among other factors. But of course, the negative impacts of downtime don’t stop at the loss of profit. It is a major inconvenience to your loyal customers, who could choose to go elsewhere or vent their frustrations on social media.
How to Prevent and Cope with Downtime
The problem with downtime is that most businesses, especially SMEs, simply don’t prepare for it. Sometimes the IT failures lie outside of the company, but the business still has to deal with it effectively.
Firstly, make sure you have the highest security measures in place and an expert IT technician on hand to resolve problems instantly. If downtime does occur, it’s critical to get systems up and running again as soon as possible. Our anytime support package is perfect for these instances, as we would send an engineer to fix the problem straight away.
It’s also important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. If downtime hits, your staff need to know the procedure and you also need to let your customers know what is happening and when the problem is likely to be resolved. Downtime can sometimes result in data loss, so businesses should prepare for that too with back up servers.
If you want to find out more about the impact of downtime and how to be best prepared, contact our IT experts.
