Multitasking was big two decades ago. Later, businesses caught on to the lower quality of work caused by distractions. Focus became the next business challenge to overcome. Managing distractions is one thing, but what happens when your computer goes down? IT downtime is a real problem that incurs losses in real-time. The cost is more significant than most companies realize, mostly because managers don’t count the costs.

After all, a few minutes of downtime won’t do too much damage to your business, right?

Maybe not. Keep reading below to learn the real cost of downtime.

Cost

Gartner conducted a downtime study for Avaya. They learned that the average costs the company $300K/hour or $5,600/minute. This number is significant enough for all businesses to consider. But what is downtime?

It is a time of inactivity or reduced activity. This is many times caused by a computer that has crashed. Network issues or computer glitches due to older software may also be a factor.

To determine what it costs your company, a common formula can be used to assess the true costs:

Cost of Downtime (per hour) =
Lost Productivity + Recovery Costs + Intangible Costs + Lost Revenue

The lost revenue may also include lost opportunity. This is especially true for sales and marketing departments working a funnel.

Prevention

There are several things you can do to help prevent or reduce downtime. The most common areas include:

Check Service Level Agreement

Review the contract with your service provider. Make sure that your uptime guarantees aren’t too low. The ideal is to get as close to 100% as possible.

Anything under 95% can be detrimental to your business.

Use Scalable Equipment

There are two things that can come from scalable equipment. First, when a node is busy, the next task can be routed to a secondary node for processing.

This load-balancing allows you to add equipment as needed with no, or limited, downtime.

Second, you are able to scale the system in advance of user demand. This may include outsourced cloud servers. New employees can receive a functional laptop at the beginning of their first day.

Disaster Recovery

Mother nature may work to bring a disaster to your business. But most recovery plans also include information on how to recover from human error. Most problems are caused by workers that make a mistake.

To prevent this, multiple redundancies must be put in place. The development of a disaster recovery playbook is essential to minimizing downtime.

Anti-Downtime Strategies

Developing a custom network design is the best solution. This is accomplished within budget through managed services. From firewalls to disaster recovery, hiring a company that specializes in reducing downtime is essential.

To reduce your downtime, contact us at Inception Network Strategies. We are dedicated to serving small businesses with an employee base of 1 to 1,000. We serve customers in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama.