The real costs of IT downtime

Your system is down: Microsoft Exchange has crashed, employees don’t have access to email, your website won’t load, or your ordering system has crashed. It’s not just an hour of inconvenience; It’s hurting your business. Your reputation, customer retention, and employee satisfaction can suffer from even the shortest interruption.

Do you want an example? On August 14, the New York Times website went down and consumer confidence collapsed. Only two hours of blackout, but its stock immediately fell, the Wall Street Journal showed up to try to rip off its customers, and the reputation-bashing Twitter account went wild. Just two hours of downtime cost the New York Times an enormous amount, not only in lost revenue, but also in lost trust and a greatly weakened competitive advantage.

According to a Forrester Research study, the cost per hour of downtime for a typical business can range from $10,000 to $1 million.

Lack of time:

· Negatively impacts employee productivity, causing you to lose thousands of dollars in man-hours for just one hour of outage.

You lose your sales, when you can’t serve your customers, which directly affects your cash flow from the start.

It means not only lost business, but also a huge loss of competitive advantage, especially when your customers turn to others in your market and then don’t come back to you.

It affects your relationships with partners and their trust in you and the reliability of your business and its infrastructure.

It lowers the morale of your employees, their trust in management, and especially their trust in your IT department and infrastructure.

· Damages your company’s reputation immediately, as well as diminishes public goodwill.

Anytime you experience an outage and downtime, whether it’s the direct effect of a security breach or your IT system and configuration failed somewhere, you’ll start to feel the damage almost immediately. While the severity of the damage naturally depends on the size of the outage, there will still be a major impact. And it’s the kind of impact you can fight to repair, but it’s hard to fully recover from.

Downtime is serious business. You can’t afford to leave the continuous uptime and availability of your systems, your technology, and your business to chance. In an increasingly competitive business environment, your customers, both internal and external, expect you to be available and ready for them wherever they are, whenever they need them. You cannot afford to lose customer trust as it is the direct path to lost profit.

How to mitigate the damage? It means a thorough audit of your systems, a careful accounting of potential weaknesses in your infrastructure. It means investing in enterprise-grade security, keeping your technology always up to date, and maintaining constant vigilance. IT is a cost that most businesses view as less important and of less value than most other budget items. And that can be a costly mistake.