How Long Can Your Office Afford to Be Down? (Tips to Avoid Downtime)
Just about every company has experienced some form of downtime. It could be caused by a local power outage that keeps you offline for 30 minutes or a major ransomware attack that makes your files unusable, causing major chaos.
In today’s “always-connected” world, downtime is one of the most costly events a company can face, and a key reason maintenance plans and backup solutions are so important.
How long can your company afford to be down before it begins severely impacting your business?
According to a downtime study by Gartner, the average cost of IT related downtime is $5,600 every single minute. Of course, differences in company size can impact the cost of downtime, but it’s still fairly expensive even for smaller companies. Here are some hourly ranges:
- Cost of downtime, low end: $140,000 per hour
- Cost of downtime, average: $300,000 per hour
- Cost of downtime, high end: $540,000 per hour
90% of organizations say that just one hour of downtime costs them at least $100,000.
It’s in a company’s best interest to minimize downtime and the associated costs, which include everything from emergency IT repairs to loss of business. So, to understand the best ways to mitigate downtime, let’s first take a look at some of the main things that can cause it.
Leading Causes of Downtime
Downtime can come out of nowhere and it can impact a single computer or your entire IT infrastructure. The best way to avoid downtime is to fully understand the causes so you can put safeguards in place to proactively avoid it when possible, and when it’s not, to have a “Plan B” in place to restore systems as soon as possible.
Here are some of the leading causes of downtime for businesses.
Network Outages
If your Wi-Fi goes offline or your cloud service provider has an outage, it can mean downtime for you for an unknown amount of time. But even when something isn’t in your control, by having backup copies of your data elsewhere, you can often mitigate the risk that a network outage will take you offline.
Human Error
Something as simple as spilling coffee on a laptop can cause downtime of a device. Other outages caused by human error can occur when an administrative setting on a network is clicked to the wrong option or an accidental click on a phishing email leads to a virus attack.
Ransomware/Malware
Ransomware is a high-impact threat for businesses, according to the alert issued October 2019 by the FBI. It’s designed to make all your files unusable by encrypting them until a ransom is paid.
Ransomware has caused retailers to have to close during the cleanup, hospitals to divert patients, and cities to take vital public services offline.
Attackers target just about every type of business and many of them succeed in getting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims who did not have a full backup of their data.
Hardware/Server Failures
When a hard drive or server crashes, it can take everything down with it and businesses can be at a loss. Just because you’re able to put a system back online, doesn’t mean your company isn’t still down.
If you’ve lost all your data due to a hardware failure, it can mean months of work before you get back to where you were before the data loss.
70% of smaller companies end up going out of business within a year of large data loss incident.
Application/Software Errors
It’s not uncommon for a software error to cause data saved in the program to be lost. One mistake that many companies make is trusting that their data stored in a 3rd party cloud application doesn’t need to be backed up.
Cloud providers are also vulnerable to outages, which is why backing up data that’s in platforms like Office 365is crucial.
Natural or Manmade Disasters
Fire, flood, tornado, or another disaster that besets your office can cause major data loss if all your files are stored on-site. These events often come out the blue without warning, which is why it’s important to employ cloud solutions that keep your data safe if something happens to your physical location.
Best Ways to Prevent Downtime
There are a couple of key tactics you can employ that will help you both reduce your risk of downtime and reduce the time it takes to get back up and fully operational again if it occurs.
Solid Data Backup and Recovery
There’s no substitute for a solid data backup and recovery plan. A majority of downtime incidents are due to data loss or data that’s become inaccessible for one reason or another.
Having a cloud backup of all the data on all your devices ensures your business can keep operating from any location with a simple data recovery from the cloud.
Most of the stories you hear about ransomware attacks and victims that did not have to pay and had minimal damage were because they had a backup to rely on.
Proactive Managed IT
Hard drives and routers don’t typically crash for no reason, there are generally warning signs of a computer or server in trouble before a crash happens. But if you’re not properly monitoring your network or devices and don’t have network management in place, you may miss the warning signs.
Maintaining your IT infrastructure is like maintaining your vehicle. If you do it properly, you can reduce outages and improve the longevity of your equipment.
Don’t Risk Losing Your Business Over Downtime
C Solutions can help you set up a reliable backup and recovery solution to ensure your business is resilient in the event of a data loss incident. We can also help you mitigate downtime risks by ensuring your equipment is running efficiently.
Schedule a free consultation today and sleep easier tonight! Call 407-536-8381 or reach us online.