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The cost of downtime by the numbers

Everybody wants to reduce expenses for their business. Reducing costs ultimately means increasing your bottom line, which in turn means increasing the amount of money in your pocket.

Before, downtime was seen in the form of something like a temporary power outage. However, with our current digital ecosystem, downtime has adopted a whole new meaning.  

Downtime is costly for all businesses, but especially for small companies. It is much more difficult for a small business to cover losses in the hundreds of thousands, and the cost of downtime continues to rise.

As a point of fact, most businesses report a single hour of downtime costs them $100,000. But did you know that downtime is more than just network outages?

Often, downtime occurs in micro-outages — a frozen computer, email servers being down, or a phone system not working as opposed to a single, major outage. In these cases, you may not be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in one fell swoop, but these micro outages occur more regularly and can quickly add up.

Proactivity is the first step to reducing downtime

The best action to take when trying to prevent outages of all sizes is to have a proactive remediation approach. This means having systems in place to monitor and catch outage-causing problems from ever impacting your staff.

And honestly, this isn’t something you can do alone.

The best way to proactively prevent outage-causing issues is to delegate that monitoring and maintenance to an IT partner. They will have the staff and the tools to monitor and remediate any issues that occur, and they can do it remotely.

Downtime is more than dollar bills

While downtime can directly correlate with things like the cost of rebooting your technology or having a service request fulfilled, it can also be seen in other ways that are not necessarily an immediate withdrawal of dollars from your bank account.

When your business is in the middle of a network outage, customers will not receive the full experience or possibly even a good experience. Your company, and perhaps your reputation, is at risk if a customer’s needs are not met appropriately.

The same applies to the hardware or software an employee relies on for customer service when it stops working. How can they be fully serving the customers when their tools are not available to them?

ITIC’s 2018 survey noted that 59% of respondents said that human error is the #1 cause of downtime. Whether that’s hardware or software malfunction, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point, your staff will cause some amount of personal downtime.

Troubleshooting the cause of things like frozen hardware or buggy software in all likelihood isn’t something your business can handle. That’s why it’s essential to have a dedicated partner who is there to identify and solve these smaller issues before they cause outsized harm to your revenue.

Minimizing downtime

When it comes to minimizing downtime, it takes a strategic plan, both in IT and for your employees’ overall productivity.

You will never be able to eliminate downtime entirely, but with a plan and procedure in mind, you can minimize it and ultimately save your business money. How do you plan to start minimizing downtime?