You don’t realise the importance of IT support and a well-run network until your systems crash or break. IT Downtime can have an effect on how potential customers view your business along with your business bottom line.
In some unfortunate events IT downtime can cause a company to go out of business. Businesses can suffer downtime because of a variety of reasons, all of which can be costly.
IT Downtime cost factors
The cost of IT downtime is going to differ from country to country along with business to business. The time taken to fix the problem is also going to have an effect on the cost as simpler problems will take less manpower to fix and won’t keep your network out for as long as a more complex problem.
The industry you are in will also have an effect on the cost of downtime so take that into mind when considering how much IT downtime could cost your business.
Average costs of IT downtime
Research from Gartner shows that a business could lose anywhere between $5600 per minute or $140,000 per hour to over $500,000 per hour depending on the size of the business.
Financial services such as banks and ecommerce websites can expect hire costs due to downtime. Enterprise companies, in particular, can see a cost of $1.5m to $5m for an hour of downtime.
Other costs of downtime.
When we talk about the costs of IT downtime we often only associate a numerical value, but there are other costs that we can’t put a monetary value on such as company perception or staff productivity levels.
Firstly company perception is how potential customers view and value your brand. IT downtime can have a negative effect on the way in which people perceive your business and could also put potential investors off your company too.
Staff productivity levels also drop when outages occur. Even if your network is only down for an hour that will put your entire organisation’s productivity levels down and it can also take time to get the levels back up too.
Preventing outages and downtime
As a business you don’t want any downtime when it comes to your IT infrastructure, unfortunately, this isn’t something anyone can guarantee as even the best-built networks can go down. Having a plan in place for such outages can cut down on IT Downtime costs.
Preparing for outages and downtime can be done with an in-house support team or it can also be assigned to an external IT support company such as us. There are many advantages and disadvantages of building an in-house team and there are advantages of outsourcing your IT support as well as disadvantages. Whichever option you do choose though will help minimise your downtime as a result of an outage.
By taking time to set up an IT downtime plan you could save your company from going out of business.