Even as technology continues to grow and improve at an impressive rate, the risk of downtime and outages is still a major fear for businesses, particularly small and medium sized (SMBs). This is because IT downtime can potentially result in severe impacts to both reputation and finances.
It’s because of the severity of the impacts of IT downtime that it’s crucial for businesses to have professional, reliable Managed IT Services that includes a secure backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution to keep their data safeguarded and ensure they can get back up and running as soon as possible if downtime does occur.
The all-too-often mistake that businesses tend to make is that they don’t fully appreciate the value and importance of BDR until after it’s too late. It’s common for businesses to only implement a backup and recovery solution once they have been hit by a disaster or downtime!
Putting a Cost Against IT Downtime
Downtime is an expected yet expensive risk of doing business today. Without the ability to maintain or restore business operations, it could result in direct losses in productivity and revenue. Below is a chart of what businesses claim to be the cost of an IT downtime incident:
There are two different types of associated costs when it comes to IT downtime; direct and indirect. The direct costs can include loss of sales or employee productivity, whilst indirect costs refer to the further consequences of the downtime, such as loss of revenue from reputational damage. The combination of both direct and indirect costs is what truly puts your business at risk. As the chart above outlines, the majority of businesses see a £35,000 – £75,000 loss just from IT downtime, with a large portion seeing even up to a £350,000 loss. Can your business really afford losing out on this level of revenue?
It’s more than likely that your businesses relies on day-to-day operations that involves data. How would you be affected if you were no longer able to access this vital data? Ask yourself if your business could still function as normal without access to this data or any relevant IT systems. Were you aware that 50% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don’t even have BDR solutions in place?
In fact, only a tiny 6% of businesses have never experienced an IT downtime event. The below chart outlines how many and how recently businesses have suffered from downtime:
IT Downtime can occur more often than you think and is easily one of the biggest IT related expenses a business can face. Simply having a backup isn’t a solution – despite common misconception, even backups can fail. A professional backup and disaster recovery solution will perform regular, reliable backups that will allow your business to recover vital data and mitigate any losses from downtime. At Spectrum Networks Solutions, our experienced IT Support team we will even ensure that you have a solid recovery plan in place and that you will have optimal recovery points – what’s more, we’ll do our very best to prevent downtime from occurring ever again. You will have complete peace of mind that even if you do experience downtime, you won’t suffer any long-term impacts on your business and revenue.
